tabby

A Mac CLI for herding browser tabs. Pure zsh + JXA, no dependencies.

Install

# Clone and add to PATH
git clone git@github.com:yy/tabby.git ~/git/tabby
export PATH="$HOME/git/tabby/bin:$PATH"

Usage

tabby list              # List all tabs as JSON
tabby list --window 1   # List tabs in window 1
tabby count             # Count tabs per window
tabby count --total     # Just the total
tabby url               # URL of active tab
tabby url 1 3           # URL of window 1, tab 3
tabby close 1 5         # Close window 1, tab 5
tabby close --url arxiv # Close first tab whose URL contains "arxiv"
tabby focus 1 3         # Switch to window 1, tab 3
tabby dedup             # Close duplicate tabs
tabby dedup --dry-run   # Preview duplicates
tabby version           # Print version (also --version, -v)

Composes with standard tools:

# Find all GitHub tabs
tabby list | jq '.[] | select(.url | test("github.com"))'

# Count tabs per domain
tabby list | jq -r '.[].url' | awk -F/ '{print $3}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

# Close all Google search tabs (careful!)
tabby close --url "google.com/search" --all

Browser selection

tabby --browser safari list         # Use Safari
TABBY_BROWSER=safari tabby list     # Same, via env var

Default: chrome. Set TABBY_BROWSER=safari in your shell profile to switch permanently.

Safe close

Tab indices shift when tabs are closed, and browsers reorder windows by recency between calls, so a window/tab index read from list can point at a different tab by the time you close it. Two ways to close safely:

tabby close --expect "GitHub" 1 5   # Only closes if title starts with "GitHub"
tabby close --url github.com/foo    # Find + close by URL in one step (no index race)
tabby close --url github.com --all  # Close every matching tab

Prefer --url in scripts: it resolves the tab and closes it inside a single call, so window reordering can't make it hit the wrong tab.

Permissions

On first run, macOS will prompt you to grant your terminal Automation access to Chrome (or Safari). This allows tabby to read tab titles/URLs and close tabs. You can revoke this in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Automation.

Privacy

tabby list outputs all tab titles and URLs to stdout. Be mindful when piping to files or logs — URLs may contain tokens, session IDs, or reveal private browsing activity.

Requirements

• macOS
• Google Chrome or Safari