Tab groups and tab search

The opencodex dashboard is tabbed like a browser: every page you open gets a tab, tabs reorder by drag, pin to the front, and move into named, coloured, collapsible groups. This page is about the group half and the search half — what each command does, what it deliberately refuses to do, and which keys drive it.

Everything here lives in the strip along the top of the dashboard. Nothing is stored on the server: the whole strip — order, pins, groups, collapsed state and per-tab appearance — is written to your own browser’s local storage under ocx-m3:tabs, so it survives a reload and never leaves the machine.

The tab menu

Right-click any tab — or press Shift+F10 or the Menu key with a tab focused — and the menu opens with eleven entries, always the same eleven, in the same order. Entries that cannot do anything right now are disabled rather than hidden, because a menu whose items move between openings is a menu whose muscle memory is wrong.

Entry	What it does
Close tab	Closes it. Disabled on the last remaining tab — the strip never empties.
Close other tabs	Everything but this one. Pinned tabs survive.
Close tabs to the right	Everything after it in strip order. Pinned tabs survive.
Pin tab / Unpin tab	Says what it will do, not what the tab currently is.
Duplicate tab	A second tab on the same page, carrying the original’s appearance.
Close tabs containing text…	Opens the bulk close with a preview.
Close tabs not containing text…	The exact negation of the same query.
Edit tab appearance…	Font, size, weight, colour, background and badge for this one tab.
New group…	Names a new group and puts this tab in it.
Move… into group…	Opens the group picker described below.
Remove from group	Takes the tab out of its group without closing it.

Two commands have a faster route: Shift+right-click goes straight to the appearance editor, and Delete closes the focused tab without opening the menu at all. Double-clicking a tab pins it; middle-clicking closes it.

Moving a tab into a group

“Move… into group…” opens a picker, not a list of groups inside the menu. That is a deliberate shape, and it is the reason the entry ends in an ellipsis. A menu that grows one entry per group grows without bound: with ten groups, “Remove from group” is somewhere off the bottom of a menu whose other ten entries never moved, and every command below the group list is at a different height every time you open it.

The picker opens anchored beside the tab you right-clicked, never on top of it — it takes the space below the tab, or above it when there is more room there, and scrolls inside itself rather than running off the screen. Nothing behind it is frozen; it is a panel, not a modal.

It shows:

• Every group, with its name, its colour and how many tabs it holds. The colour is decoration — the row’s accessible name is the group’s name and count, so a group is never identified by colour alone.
• A marker on the group the tab is already in. Choosing that row simply closes the picker.
• A marker on any collapsed group. Moving a tab into a collapsed group is allowed and leaves the group collapsed — you collapsed it, and a move is not a request to undo that. Because the tab then lands somewhere the strip will not draw, the picker says so before you choose rather than after.
• A search field with the full regex builder beside it, exactly like every other search surface in opencodex. Plain text is the default; the .* builder opens anchored to that field and hands the finished pattern straight back to it.
• A create-new-group row. Type a name, press Enter, and the group is created with this tab already in it — one commit, so there is never a moment where an empty group exists.
• An honest empty state. With no groups yet the picker says so and points at the create row, which is different from “your filter matched nothing” and is worded differently.

Keyboard

Key	In the picker
↓ from the search field	Moves to the first group
↑ / ↓	Moves between groups; ↑ from the first row returns to the search field
Home / End	First / last group
Enter	Moves the tab into the focused group. In the search field with exactly one match, moves it into that one
Esc	Clears a non-empty filter first; a second press closes the picker

Focus lands on the search field when the picker opens, and returns to the tab it was opened from whichever way it closes — moved, cancelled or dismissed by clicking away.

A pinned tab cannot join a group, so the menu entry is disabled for one. Pinned tabs occupy a fixed region that must stay visible when everything else overflows, and a member of a collapsible group cannot promise that.

Groups themselves

Right-click a group header for its own menu: collapse or expand, rename, edit the group’s appearance, or ungroup. “Ungroup” releases the members — it never closes them.

Dragging works in both directions: drag a tab onto a group header to join it, and drag a group header to reorder the groups themselves. The picker above exists because dragging is the only other route in, and a drag is unreachable from the keyboard.

A group’s colour tints its whole run in the strip, and a collapsed group still draws its header with a member count, so collapsing never makes a group disappear.

The four tab searches

The magnifier in the strip opens a panel with four independent searches. Each owns its own query, its own plain-text-or-regex mode, and its own anchored regex builder — nothing is shared between them, so a pattern typed in one cannot silently narrow another.

Search	Scope
Tabs in this window	Every tab in this strip, including the ones in the overflow menu
Tabs in group	One search per group, keyed to that group so a query cannot cross a boundary
Groups by name	Finds the group rather than the tab
Every open tab	This window plus every other window with the dashboard open

The last one unions this strip with snapshots the other windows broadcast, and can activate or close a tab in another window from here. Revealing a result that sits inside a collapsed group does not expand that group permanently.

Every search matches against a tab’s visible label and nothing else. Page contents are never read.

Closing many tabs at once

“Close tabs containing text…” and “Close tabs not containing text…” open the same panel in two modes. Before anything closes it shows the exact list of tabs that would go and a count against the total; pinned tabs are excluded unless you explicitly opt in, and the panel says how many were spared. An empty query is refused in words rather than by a silently greyed button, because an empty query would match every tab and close the strip.

The preview and the close read one function, so the number you review cannot disagree with what the strip loses.

Suggested articles

• Web dashboard — every screen these tabs open, and the rest of the shell.
• Exporting lists and acting in bulk — the same “never overstate what was done” rule applied to lists.
• Settings — theme, density, fonts and the appearance system the per-tab editor writes into.