tabstack orders your tabs by when you last used them, so Cmd+J always takes you back to the tab you were just on. Hold Cmd to keep going back, or search every open tab from the keyboard. It works in Chrome and Firefox, and in Zen and other browsers built on Firefox.

Install it from the Chrome Web Store (Chrome, Brave, Edge and other Chromium browsers) or Firefox Add-ons (Firefox and Zen). More at tabstack.alethi.dev.

Shortcuts

On Windows and Linux, use Ctrl in place of Cmd.

Keys	What it does
Cmd+J	Switch to your last tab
Hold Cmd, press J again	Go further back, then let go of Cmd to switch
Cmd+Shift+J	Step forward again, while Cmd is still held
Cmd+Shift+Space	Search your open tabs
Cmd+/	Search too, but only on web pages
Hold Cmd, press / again	Go further back in search, then let go of Cmd to switch

While the switcher is open:

• Backspace or X closes the selected tab (Cmd+Backspace while searching)
• Esc cancels
• Arrow keys and Tab move the selection, and clicking a card switches to it

Search

Type to filter and press Enter to switch. Search matches a tab's title, site and address, and forgives typos, so "gpr" finds GitHub Pull Request and "githb" still finds GitHub. When only one tab matches, tabstack switches to it on its own.

Before you type anything, a tab on a call comes first, marked with a red microphone, then tabs playing sound. Type "call" or "sound" to find them too. Chrome knows a call by the page using your microphone or camera; Firefox knows it by the address, such as Google Meet or Zoom.

Turn on recently closed tabs in settings and they show up below your open ones, where Enter reopens one.

Settings

Click the toolbar icon to change the shortcuts and a few switches:

• switch straight to the tab when search finds only one
• include recently closed tabs in search
• cycle through the current window's tabs only (search still covers every window)
• show how long each step of a switch takes, for debugging

Chrome doesn't let an extension change its own shortcuts, so there Change opens chrome://extensions/shortcuts. In Firefox you record the new one right in the popup. The toolbar icon turns red when another extension already has Cmd+J.

Cmd+/, search on web pages, is tabstack's own, so you record a new one in the popup in either browser. Clear turns it off, for sites that want the key themselves, like code editors that comment out a line with it.

Browser pages

Browsers don't let extensions draw on their own pages, like chrome:// pages and the new tab page. On those pages:

• Cmd+J still switches, but no cards appear until you reach a web page.
• Search opens in the toolbar popup.

Chrome profiles

Chrome keeps each profile's extensions apart, so on its own tabstack only sees the tabs in the profile it's in. If you keep more than one, like Work and Personal, an optional helper, the tabstack command, connects tabstack in all of them:

• Ctrl+Cmd+Right and Ctrl+Cmd+Left bring the next or previous profile's window to the front. The windows stay stacked in the same place and size, so it feels like flipping between them.
• Cmd+J goes back to the tab you used last, whichever profile it's in, and holding Cmd shows other profiles' recent tabs among the cards. Search does the same: the tab you used last comes first.
• Search covers every profile's tabs, and typing a profile's name switches to it.
• Links to sites you list for a profile open there, whichever profile you click them in.
• The right-click menu moves a tab, or opens a link, in another profile.
• Opening a page that's already open in another profile offers to go there instead.
• Each profile gets an icon and a color. It replaces tabstack's toolbar icon, sits over search, and marks that profile's tabs and notices in the others.

It works in Chrome, Brave, Edge, Chromium and Vivaldi, on macOS and Linux. On Linux the profile shortcuts are Alt+Shift+Right and Alt+Shift+Left. Nothing changes until you set it up:

brew install grindlemire/tap/tabstack
tabstack install

install finds tabstack in each of your profiles and opens a tab in each, where you click Allow, name the profile and click Done. Everything else is under Profiles in tabstack's popup. The helper runs only while the browser does and makes no network requests.

From the terminal:

Command	What it does
tabstack list	Every profile, numbered, and how it's connected
tabstack connect, disconnect, reset	Connect a profile, stop it connecting, or clear its name and links
tabstack rename <profile> <name>	Change the name other profiles show
tabstack links <profile> [add|remove <pattern>]	The links that open in a profile
tabstack tabs [<words>]	Every profile's tabs, most recent first
tabstack focus <profile> [<tab>]	Bring a profile forward, or one of its tabs
tabstack open <link>	Open a link in the profile it belongs to
tabstack doctor	Check the setup, and fix what it can
tabstack uninstall	Disconnect every profile and unregister the helper

A profile is its number from list, its name, or its folder. tabstack completion bash|zsh|fish prints shell completion.

Privacy

tabstack has no servers, accounts or analytics. Your settings, the order of your tabs and their thumbnails stay in your browser's own storage, and incognito tabs are never saved. The privacy policy has the details.

How it works

The browser tells an extension when a shortcut is pressed, but not when Cmd comes up. So tabstack draws its overlay inside the page, where it can watch the keys.

Across profiles, the browser starts the helper over native messaging for each profile's tabstack. The first copy to start becomes the hub, and the others pass their messages through it.

The extension is TypeScript with no runtime dependencies, in src/:

Path	Job
background/index.ts	Tab stack, the switch shortcut and messages
background/thumbnails.ts	Thumbnails and favicons
background/profiles.ts, background/covers.ts	Working across profiles, and which profile a link belongs to (Chrome)
content/index.ts, ui/	The overlay in each page
content/relay.ts	Passes keys from iframes to the overlay
content/media.ts	Notices a page turning on the microphone or camera, for calls in search (Chrome)
pages/switcher/	Search on browser pages
pages/settings/	The settings popup
pages/setup/	Setting up profiles (Chrome)
shared/	Settings, shortcuts and message types every part uses, and the icons a profile can pick, from Phosphor

The helper is Go, in cmd/tabstack/.

Development

The extension is TypeScript, in src/, bundled with Bun into one plain script for each part (scripts/build.ts). It has no runtime dependencies; bun install only fetches the build tools. Install Bun, then:

bun install
bun run dev

bun run dev builds the extension into dist/chrome/ and dist/firefox/, and builds them again whenever something in src/ changes. To load your build in place of the store version:

• Chrome. Open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode, click "Load unpacked" and pick dist/chrome/. After a rebuild, click the reload button on tabstack's card.
• Firefox and Zen (128 or later). Open about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox, click "Load Temporary Add-on" and pick dist/firefox/manifest.json. After a rebuild, click Reload.

Before sending a change:

Command	What it does
bun run check	Type-checks with TypeScript
bun run lint	Lints and checks formatting with Biome; bun run format fixes the formatting
bun run test	Runs the tests

To work on the helper, run go test ./... and go build in cmd/tabstack/, then ./tabstack install to register your build.

Releasing

• Extension. Bump version in src/manifest.json and run bun run build. It writes tabstack-<version>-chrome.zip and tabstack-<version>-firefox.zip to dist/; upload each to its store. Firefox also wants the source, since its package is bundled: git archive --format=zip -o dist/tabstack-<version>-source.zip HEAD. The listing text is in store/listing.md.
• Helper. Run cmd/tabstack/release.sh <version>. It builds for macOS and Linux, publishes a release on grindlemire/homebrew-tap, and points the formula at it. -n stops after building.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.