Rabbit Smart Tab help.

The panel, top to bottom

Memory relief is an estimate rather than a measurement. Smart Tab counts 150 MB for each archived tab, which is roughly what a loaded tab costs. Under it sit the two buttons you’ll press most: Collapse all tabs, which saves every tab in the window and closes them, and Save current tab, which does one.

Below that: the workspace you’re filing into, the search box, the filters, and the saved tabs themselves. Local only in the corner is the point of the whole thing. None of this leaves your browser.

Saving tabs

As well as the two buttons, right-clicking a tab gives you Save tab to Rabbit Smart Tab, Save window to Rabbit Smart Tab, and Snooze Tab Until… with In 1 hour and Next morning. A snoozed tab closes now and opens itself again at the time you picked, as long as the browser is running. If it isn’t, the tab arrives shortly after you next open it.

Every save closes the tabs it saved, and every save can be undone. The message at the bottom of the panel offers Undo for ten seconds.

Getting them back

Open on a card brings back one tab. Open all brings back everything currently shown, so it respects the search and filter you have on. Tick a few cards and Open selected restores only those.

Tabs that were in a tab group come back in a group, with the name and colour they had before.

Workspaces

Everything starts in Inbox. + Workspace makes another one, per project if that suits you, and Manage renames it, gives it a description, or deletes it. When you delete a workspace you choose what happens to its links: move them to Inbox, or delete them with it.

To move things afterwards, tick the cards you want, pick a workspace in the dropdown and press Move selected.

Finding a tab again

Press / anywhere in the panel to jump into the search box. Search covers the title, the domain, any tags you’ve added, and the first part of the page’s text, which Smart Tab captured when it saved the tab. It forgives near misses, so a half-remembered title usually still finds it.

The chips underneath narrow the list to All tabs, Pinned or Scheduled, scheduled being the snoozed ones waiting to come back.

The command palette

⌘K, or Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux, opens a palette with the actions you’d otherwise go hunting for: collapse all tabs, open the visible ones, open the selected ones, switch theme, create a workspace. Type to narrow the list, then pick the one you want.

Auto-archiving idle tabs

The switch at the bottom of the panel, Auto-archive idle tabs, hands memory back without you doing anything. A background tab you haven’t touched for two hours gets saved and closed, and Smart Tab checks every fifteen minutes. The tab you’re looking at and anything you’ve pinned are left alone.

Backups, exports and imports

Export writes your archive to a JSON file. It offers you a passphrase first. Give one and the file is encrypted with AES-GCM before it’s written, so a backup sitting in your downloads folder isn’t a readable list of everywhere you’ve been. Leave it blank for plain JSON.

Smart Tab also writes a backup of its own once a day, into Downloads → Rabbit Smart Tab → backups. Import OneTab reads either a JSON export or a plain text file of addresses, one per line, and merges it into the workspace you’re in.

Tidying up

••• on a card sets a custom title and tags. Both are searchable, and a tag shows on the card. × deletes the entry, with an undo in the message that follows. The sun icon at the top cycles the theme between following your computer, dark and light.

What stays on your device

All of it. Saved tabs, workspaces, tags and settings live in your browser’s local storage, and the page text used for searching is a snippet of up to 1,000 characters, taken when the tab was saved. Nothing is uploaded, there’s no account, and there’s no server of ours holding a copy of your session.

The flip side is that removing the extension removes the archive with it. Export occasionally, or leave the daily backup switched on.