The Tab Enumerator

Background

Most modern web browsers provide a keyboard shortcut for CTRL/CMD + #, where # is a number from 1 through 9, which will change the tab to the specified tab index, except for 9, which will point to the last tab. This shortcut is very useful for speeding up tab switching, but runs into one significant issue: no numbers are displayed, so to determine which number to press is either a guessing game, or one would have to count out the tabs from the left, negating any benefit the shortcut had.

What does this extension do?

This extension adds a binding where whenever the CTRL/CMD key is held down, it will display numbers in place of the favicons of the tabs in the current window to denote which tab CTRL/CMD + # will switch to.

Installation

Currently, this extension is not on the Chrome Webstore (due to the fact that I believe it isn't stable enough to be able to release yet), so it must be installed manually.

In order to do this, a few steps will need to be taken in order to put Chrome into extension dev mode, and load the unpacked extension:

There are two different versions of the extension: one for Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc.), and one for non-Chromium browsers that don't support all of the Manifest V3 features (Firefox), and as a result use the Manifest V2 WebExtensions API for compatibility.

1. Extract the corresponding release zip file to a safe location (a home directory is a good place for it, since the unzipped folder needs to be present while using the extension)
2. Follow the guides below corresponding to your browser type

Chromium/Manifest V3 Installation

1. Navigate to chrome://extensions
2. Enable the "Developer Mode" slider
3. Click on "Load unpacked"
4. Click on open after navigating to the root of the unzipped archive (should have a manifest.json file in it)

Firefox/Manifest V2 Installation

Note that due to the unsigned nature of this extension, it needs to be re-added every time firefox is restarted (this is a limitation of the browser itself, so I can't work around it).

1. Navigate to about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox
2. Click on "Load Temporary Add-on..."
3. Select the manifest.json file inside the unzipped archive

How do I build it from source?

1. Clone this repo into a safe directory. In this example, I will clone it to the home directory:

git clone https://github.com/lxsavage/chromium-tab-numbers.git ~/chromium-tab-numbers

2. Install all packages with yarn:

yarn install

3. Build the project:

yarn build

4. Follow the installation instructions normally, using dist.chrome/ for Chromium browsers, and dist.firefox/ for other browsers (mainly Firefox) that support the WebExtensions API.