Got Tabs?

Hey there! Ever find yourself wanting a simple way to create tab spacers without resorting to browser extensions? That was me a while back, and that’s when the idea for this little Tab app popped into my head. It started with a simple goal: to add tab bar spaces without titles. But as I tinkered and tailored it, it blossomed into something much more robust and versatile. Let me take you through its journey and highlight the cool features it now boasts.

The Backstory

Initially, all I wanted was a way to create clean-looking tab spacers in tab lists and menus. The trouble was, browser extensions weren’t quite cutting it. So, I went ahead and built a solution that let me remove tab titles and icons, keeping those spacers looking neat and tidy. But, as with most passion projects, one thing led to another, and soon enough, it evolved into the multi-purpose app I have today.

Key Features

Let’s dive into what makes this app so handy:

Customizable Titles
- You can name your tabs with titles up to 50 characters or even leave them blank if you prefer a minimalist look.
Customizable Icons
- For quick selection, there’s a dropdown with 96 predefined icons, including custom images, a few from the Font Awesome set, and a selection of 64 useful emoticons. And yes, you can pop in a URL to any image you want for the tab icon. It won’t do any custom cropping but will scale the image to fit. Square images work best for this. The icon text field can handle up to 300 characters.
Markdown Note Storage
- Towards the end of the development, I added one of the most useful features: the ability to store short notes using standard markdown syntax.
- There’s a real-time preview of the markdown note that updates as you type, making editing a breeze.
- Plus, there’s a button to toggle line wrapping in the text editor for added convenience.
Edit Mode Toggle
- Once you’ve set everything the way you like, you can save your changes and disable “edit mode.” This hides the form fields and displays the read-only markdown note as the page content.

Here’s the magic that makes sharing easy: All customizations, from the tab title and icon to the notes, are serialized and base64 encoded. This data is then stored as a web query in the page’s URL. This way, you can save customized tabs as bookmarks or share them via links. When someone opens the link, the customizations are automatically applied.

Now, a little technical tidbit: To ensure that the full encoded data can be stored safely across all browsers, its size is limited so that the entire URL (including protocol, domain, path, and query) never exceeds 2048 characters. So, if you want to include a longer note, try to keep the tab title and icon as short as possible.