Tab grouper

Automatically manage your tab groups in chrome based on the websites you visit and rules you define.

Tab grouper lets you create rules for each website saying which URL pattern to match, the name of the tab group, and optionally a color, and the extension will add matching websites to the appropriate tab groups as you browse to them. For example, you could have all jira tickets in a single group, all amazon pages in another, and all google search results in another.

Creating rules

Before you use this extension, you need to create a set of rules for which sites to group into which tabs. Go to the extension options, and there is a textbox where you can add the list of rules.

Here are some examples of rules:

||google.com Google grey
||example.atlassian.net "Company JIRA" blue
||unnamed.example.com ""

The first example groups all google web pages (anything at google.com) in a tab group called "Google" and colors the tab group grey.

The last example creates an unnamed tab group using empty quotes. It will also have a default color assigned as none was specified.

Rules consist of a pattern (the ||google.com part), the name of the tab group to group matching tabs under, and an optional color for the tab group to have when tabs are first grouped together by the extension. If you leave the color off, the group color will be set automatically, which usually means the tab group will be colored Grey.

The list of valid colors are: grey, blue, red, yellow, green, pink, purple, and cyan.

Pattern format

If you just want to group sites together by domain, the above example is probably all you need, put || before the domain you want to group together and add the name and color of the tab group afterwards. For simple domain based grouping this is all you need.

The pattern format is based off of that used by adblocking tools in their rulesets. You can see some details of the pattern format at: https://kb.adguard.com/en/general/how-to-create-your-own-ad-filters#basic-rules-syntax. As we only match on URLs and don't look for elements on the page, only the basic rule syntax that specifies whole web pages is used.

The pattern format is as follows:

• Any text given must appear somewhere in the URL. So google.com would match https://google.com/ as well as https://www.mysite.com/something/google.com.html.
• If || is at the beginng of a pattern, then the text given matches the URL's domain. Subdomains also match, as do http and https. So ||google.com will match http://google.com/, https://www.google.com/, and https://chrome.google.com/, but not https://example.com/google.com.
• A single pipe character (|) can be placed at the beginning or end of a pattern to match the beginning or end of the URL. In other words, a pipe at the beginning means that the text must appear at the beginning of the URL (including any https:// at the beginning). So |https://www.google.com/| will only match the exact URL https://www.google.com/ and nothing else.
• Asterisks (*) are wildcards, and will match any text.
• A caret (^) is considered a separator character. It matches anything that isn't a number, letter or one of the characters _, -, ., %. It also matches the end of the URL.

You can also match URLs based on regular expressions. To do this, surround your pattern with /. For example /^https?://google.com/?$/. You don't need to escape slashes inside the regular expression.

Temporarily disabling automatic tab grouping

If you want to stop automatically grouping tabs temporarily, click on the extension's icon. The icon will then show "Off" in a badge to show that automatic tab grouping is disabled. Clicking the icon again will re-enable automatic grouping.