Chapter 5. The Wonders of Tabbed Browsing
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## Chapter 5. The Wonders of Tabbed Browsing

In this information age with our stream of consciousness constantly being dispersed by links to different resources on the Net, it is a challenge to keep track of where you are going. The need for being able to access several pages in parallel arises. Tabbed browsing gives you an easy way to browse multiple sites in parallel.

If you are not already familiar with the concept of tabbed browsing you can think of a tab as a separate browsing context with its own history and various other browsing state information, such as search word and document loading. Whenever you stumble upon a link to a document that you want to follow without leaving the current document, you can open it in a new tab. This makes it possible to more easily jump between pages on the Net and removes the need for running more than one ELinks for that purpose.

Options related to tabs are located under “User Interface -> Window Tabs” in the option manager. In the configuration file the naming prefix is “ui.tabs”.

Tabbed browsing has been supported since version 0.9.0 and is fairly complete. The documentation on tabs is therefore divided into two chapters: a general introduction and an introduction to advanced topics.

## Introduction to the basic actions involving tabs

### The tab bar and the tab menu

The current state of all opened tabs are displayed in the tab bar. The tab bar will, by default, become visible when more than one tab is open, but this is configurable. For each open tab, the document title will be shown, possibly truncated. The current tab is highlighted. The tab bar will also display a load meter for tabs that are loading documents. Finally, any tab that has not been selected since its document was loaded will be marked as “fresh” by using a different coloring scheme.

The tab menu gives access to tab specific actions along with some other useful document specific actions. So even if you haven't configured keybindings for all actions, chances are you will find it in the tab menu. By default, it is opened by pressing e.

### Creating new tabs

When creating new tabs, it is possible to specify whether to create the tab and make it the current active tab or if the tab is to be created “in the background” — that is, without it taking over the focus.

Tabs can be created either with or without specifying a desired first document to load. That is, you can open links or submitted forms in a new tab or just open a new tab. Depending on your configuration, the latter will load the configured homepage in the newly created tab or simply leave the tab blank with no loaded document.

By default, t will open a new tab and T will open the current link in a new backgrounded tab. You can configure keybindings for opening a new tab in the background and opening the current link as the active tab.

### Switching between tabs

By default, it is possible to switch between tabs by using < and > to select the previous and next tab, respectively. When positioned at the leftmost tab, and switching to the previous tab, the tab switching will perform a wrap-around so that the rightmost tab will be selected. The wrap-around behaviour is configurable.

### Closing tabs

Tabs can by default be closed by pressing c. It is possible to optionally have a confirmation dialog pop up when closing a tab to avoid accidental closing. To complement closing of the current tab, it is also possible to close all tabs but the current one. No key is by default configured for this; the tab menu, however, provides this ability.

Note: downloads initiated from a tab are in no way tied to that tab, so tabs can be closed and the download will not be affected.

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