A person watching over my shoulder asked “How are you switching around so fast?” and I realized that while most readers here know this trick, some may not, and it’s awfully useful.

[Update: I published an earlier version of this in 2012 but have got that “How do you” question a couple times recently, so maybe it’ll still be new news to a few people.]

In all the browers I use, Command-1 takes you to your leftmost tab, command-2 to the next one over, and so on up to Command-8. Command-9 selects the rightmost tab. Also, you can right-click on a tab and “pin” it; which shrinks it down to just the favicon, and moves it as far left as it can go.

So the trick is, pin the same heavily-used tabs in the same place, and leave them there forever. In my main browser (currently Safari) it’s like this:

1. SMS/RCS texts, linked to my Pixel. This is a Google thing, not sure if you need to be on Android for it to work. But for those serious conversations that remain in text-land, it’s awfully nice when you can resort to an actual keyboard.

2. Calendar.

3. Mastodon (CoSocial via the Phanpy client).

4. The local staging version of this blog, where I review and edit articles.

5. What you are now reading.

6. Blog comment review/approval.

7. Quamina (probably moving to Codeberg soon).

8. Bluesky; but it seems I never go there any more unless I’m following links from elsewhere. To be honest, not sure what I’d replace it with.

Have fun!