TABTREE
A Tab Organizer Plug-in for MyIE2/Maxthon
1. Highlights
- Organize all opened tabs in a tree form, and automatically synchronizes with MyIE2/Maxthon
- Tabs automatically grouped by referrer, domain, or drag-drop
- Batch operation for all tabs under the same group
- Support to export/import trees to/from a user file (favorite tree)
- Tabs (read, unread, loading, and referrer) and groups are distinguished by different icons
- Highly customizable display style (color, fontsize, etc.)
- Auto-Renaming to truncate/replace titles with long common prefix
- Works in either a float window or the sidebar. Switchable via a toolbar button.
- Auto-Hide mode
- Single click or mouse wheel to switch tabs
- Double click to close tab or group. (double click on a referrer tab node will only close the corresponding referrer tab, and convert it into a Group folder, so that the subtree under it will not be destroied)
- Mouse gesture: drag (hold the left-button) within the title of a tree node for a certain distance (at least 20 pixels) and release
- "Left-Right" or "Right-Left": refresh corresponding tab or tabs under a group
- "Right": scroll to the bottom of the corresponding tab
- "Left": scroll to the top of the corresponding tab
- Mouse Wheel on a tab node: first switch to that tab and then scrolls the corresponding window
- Mouse Wheel on a group node (domain/referrer/usergroup): fast switch tabs under the same group in turn. (in order to use this function on a referrer, you need to put the mouse pointer on its icon; wheel on its title will scroll corresponding page). Currently it can only switch it's first level child tabs.
- Shift-Click on a page: open a new tab and group it under the clicked page
- Refresh Broken Links: refresh only broken links under a group without affecting other pages
3.1 How are tabs grouped (priorities)
- By Referrer: A new tab is first considered to be grouped under its referrer, if its referrer is found to be another tab in tabtree. Two ways to generate referer information:
(1) open a new tab via shift-click or "open in new window" in the context menu of the link. NOTE that mouse gesture (drag a link) and middle click can not work due to a limitation of IE, and and some websites (like maxthon forum) create referrer even for left-click.
(2) use Auto-Referrer: left click a link on an "Auto-Referrer" page can open the link in a new tab and generate referrer information automatically. Use "Toggle Auto-Referrer" in the context menu of a tabtree node or the button on the toolbar can set or cancel the selected tab to be an Auto-Referrer page.- Grouped under its domain: if the referrer node a new page is not found in tabtree, the tab will be automatically grouped under its domain group. "Local Files" and "Blank Tabs" are distinguished as two special domain groups. Domain group is the first-level child node of the tree root node. Note that by default only those domain groups that contain at least two child tabs will be displayed in the tree.
- Drag-Drop and create user group: You can further organize tabs by moving tabs around via drag-drop and/or creating user groups. A tab could be dragged and dropped under any other nodes except for its child.
Figure 1: Dialogs and Popup Menus. Note that they can never be opened at the same time, and they are put together just to illustrate how each of them could be invoked by another (red arrows)
3.3 Main Window (A in figure 1)
Tab node icons (flashing icons are for corresponding tabs in loading/incomplete state)
read unread Normal tabs and referrer tabs Auto-Referrer Tabs Other node icons
Group (including domain/user groups and root node) Auto-refreshing Tabs Toolbar Icons
Tabtree Setups Favorite Tree Auto-renaming Mode Auto-Hide Mode Switch to Float-Window Switch to Sidebar
3.4 My Favorite Tree Dialog (B in figure 1)
- Users can export tabtree in the main window to a user file (data/myfavtree.txt) and selectively import them later. This can work as a tree-form "Group" (the "Group" in maxthon is one dimension)
- The stored tree can be adjusted (move, delete, rename etc) in the "My Favorite Tree Dialog". Note that check/uncheck a non-leaf node will set/clear all its child nodes, but click on the title of a node will only toggle the state of the node itself.
- When exporting multiple nodes/subtrees selected in this dialog, the "minimum tree" that can contain all selected items will be generated, therefore the structure of the tree in this dialog will be retained after imported to the main window.
3.5 Auto-Renaming (C in figure 1)
- Why auto-renaming? Some websites give long titles on their pages, for example, all google search pages have a title started with "Google Search: ". And you may not like the prefix "Google Search: " because it will appear in the title of all google search pages and does not provide much useful information to you. Long title could be a problem in a multi-tab browser, because when there are many tabs, all you can see is just sth like "Google Se..", or "Maxthon Forum..." on the maxthon forum, and it becomes difficult to locate the tab you want.
- To use auto-renaming in tabtree, you first need to enable the "Auto Renaming" mode. You can either click the botton
on the toolbar or from the setup menu.
- Then you need to add some entries to the auto-rename rule list. To do so, select "Add to Auto-Rename ..." command in the context menu, you will see a dialog as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Add to Auto-Rename Dialog
The URL and Title of the current node will be automatically filled in filed F.1 and F.2 respectively. You need to truncate them so that they can be used as macthing prefix. For example, in Figure 2, the original URL is "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=maxthon", and original Title is "Google Search: maxthon". Trancate F.1 to "http://www.google.com/search?" and F.2 to "Google Search: ", fill the field F.3 with a short string ([GS] in the example) or even leave it empty, so all google search pages that have a URL started with "http://www.google.com/search?" AND a title started with "Google Search: ", will be automatically renamed to "[gs]......"- You can further edit, delete, and enable/disable individual rule entries in the "Edit Auto-Rename Dialog" (Figure 1-C)
3.6 Node Context Menu (D in figure 1)
- Invoked by right click a node in the tabtree
- Mainly three types of operations
- Common operations on all types of nodes : New Group, Rename, Export to Favorite Tree, and Import from Favorite Tree
- Group/Batch operations on group nodes : Close Group, Mark All as Read, Mark All as Unread, Refresh Group, Refresh only Broken links, Copy Group URL to clipboard, Save Group, Add Group to Favorite, Add Group to BlockList.
- Single tab operations on a single tab (including referrer tab): Close, Mark as Read, Mark as Unread, Refresh, Copy URL, Save, Add to Favorite, Add to Blocklist.
- A plugin-setup menu item is also included to provide access to the setup menu in case the toolbar is disalbled and there is no blank area in Tabtree.
3.7 Setup Menu (E in Figure 1)
3.E.1 Appearance Settings:
Language, Font Size, Color, Reset Skin. config_default.ini is used to store preset default configuration (including color, font-size, show root node, show line, show all domain, etc.), and config_user.ini is used to store user's own prefered configuration.
- At the first time you run tabtree, you will be asked if you want to restore the configuration you used in the last version of Tabtree. You can select 'OK' to restore or 'Cancel' to use the configuration that comes with the latest installation package (in config_default.ini). Later you can also use "Reset Skin"-"Default" to load the default settings.
- You can store your prefered setups in the file config_user.ini (after you have adjusted to your satisfied settings, make a copy of config.ini and rename it into "config_user.ini". You can restore/load it later by "Reset Skin"-"User".
3.E.2 Tree Layout Settings
Turn off the following several options to save space and have tabtree display more tabs in a small window.
- Show Toolbarhide/display toolbar
- Show Root: hide/display root node
- show Connection Line: hide/display connection lines in the tree.
- Show Single Tab Domain: hide/display domains which have only one child node
- Show Tooltip: hide/display tooltip for tabs
3.E.3 Auto-Rename Settings
- Auto-Rename: Enable/Disalbe auto-renaming
- Auto Short Domain: if enabled, some common prefix (www.) and postfixes (.com, .net, .edu, etc.) of domain names will be truncated
- Protect Browser Tab: if enabled, the tabs in Maxthon/MyIE2 will not be renamed by auto-renamming, i.e., auto-renaming will only affect the tab titles you see in tabtree.
3.E.4 System Functions
- Auto-Sync: Automatically synchronize with MyIE2/Maxthon (detecting tabs and closed tabs)
- Auto-Growing: under this mode, all tabs will be grouped under the current active tab. Please refer to 3.A.2 for details.
- Auto-Hide: minimize itself when the mouse pointer is not over. Note that the toogling speed may not be good on a slow computer (I tested it on my old celeron 500Mhz, and it takes 2 or even 3 seconds to restore the original size)
- Restart TabTree
3.E.5 Favorite Tree and Auto-Rename Rules Management
- Organize Favorite Tree
- Auto-Rename Config
- Tabtree can only work with Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher. First check the version of your Internet Explorer (if you can not find the shortcut to ie, go to start menu-run, and type iexplore), click Help-About Internet Explorer, and make sure the version is at least 6.0.
- If you still have problem, go to "Option" menu of Maxthon/MyIE2, open "Maxthon Option" or "MyIE2 Option", on the "General" page, uncheck the box beside "Disable script error". By this step, you will be able to see script error dialog when you run tabtree (if there is any). You may want to reverse this box to "checked" later to avoid annoy error messages (many websites have error in their scripts). Now restart Maxthon/MyIE2 and click Tabtree, if you see some error message like "Automation-server cannot create object", please try the following steps:
- 1. Check if scrrun.dll exsists on your system. Search "scrrun.dll" under your windows folder (c:\windows by default). You may see a list of scrrun.dll. At least one scrrun.dll srrun.dll should appear under your windows\system32 (or windows\system under windows 98) folder. You may also see (one or more) scrrun.dll under some uninstallation folders (for example, windows\$NtServicePackUninstall$), which were created by some software that replaced srrun.dll during their installation. If so, please let me know the name of those softwares.
- 2. If you do see a srrun.dll under windows\system32 (or windows\system), please check its version by right clicking the file, property, and select the "version" page. Record the version number if necessary. Try regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\scrrun.dll (or regsver32 c:\windows\system\scrrun.dll under windows 98, change the path name if necessary. Please refer to step 2) and see if the problem could be fixed.
- 3. If the problem persists or there is no srrun.dll under windows\system32, you may have to reinstall windows script. I'm not sure if the installation will automatically register scrrun. Manually register scrrun.dll (as described in step 2) after the installation if necessary.
Please check the following sites for the latest version
TabTree @ Tara's MyIE2/Maxthon Plug-in Collection (official site)
Thread on Maxthon Forum English (new) Chinese (new) English (abc@home's thread) Chinese (abc@home's thread