Let Your Tabs Die

I don’t organize my tabs. I order them by recency and configure them to auto-close after 48 hours of inactivity (using Tab Wrangler). Vertical tabs help here - I can fit a lot on the screen at once and quickly scan through them. Anything I’ve used recently stays near the top. Anything I haven’t touched in two days quietly disappears. If I need it again, it’s in my history.

I do the same thing everywhere I can. Terminal sessions: open a new one, do the thing, move on, search shell history if I need it later. Notes in Obsidian: flat vault, no folder hierarchy, find things through search and backlinks. Jira tickets, GitHub issues: they’re browser tabs, so they follow the same rule.

I think of it like a cache. The tabs I can see without scrolling are L1 - my current working set. Tabs that have been pushed down by newer ones but are still open are L2. Once something times out it gets evicted to long-term storage: browser history, search, whatever. I don’t have to make an active decision to close or archive anything - stuff just fades out on its own.

The important bit is that nothing is actually gone. Everything ends up in history or search. If closing a tab meant it was lost forever, this would be a terrible approach. But it doesn’t - it just means it’s not in my face anymore.

Most tools don’t support this out of the box, which is annoying. Browsers don’t auto-close tabs. Terminals don’t order by recency. It takes a bit of setup, but once it’s there I don’t think about tab management at all. Which is the whole point.

- omegastick