Ideas on managing minimized windows better?

Software
1

I find myself minimizing a lot these days. (Working on a large project with a lot of prototyping. Say, 20-40 windows with 80-120 tabs between them at any given time.)

It’s pretty clear a workflow that leans into minimizing isn’t macOS’ strong suit. It’s hard to get much context out of 15-20 tiny thumbnails with often similar titles. But I simply juggle too many windows at the moment to keep them free-floating and defer to Mission Control. I also don’t want to hide them, shunt them to different desktops, or tab them more than I already tab them, as that’s even less context and longer access time. I’d just like more context about what I minimized.

Ideally, I’d love a function to know the timestamp I either created or minimized a window I’m hovering over in the dock; a function to sort minimized windows by app then timestamp; and a preview thumbnail when you hover over the minimized window, like on Windows. (I know some apps port those previews to macOS but I haven’t found one that works on minimized windows.)

In a non-ideal world, I’m looking for any roundabout way to achieve at least one of these things even if it’s a bit clunky. Or, other ideas.

It doesn’t help my minimized window managemement either that for some reason, when I minimize all windows of an app, then click that app in the dock, it selects a window to restore seemingly randomly, not necessarily the window that was oldest or newest to get minimized. Not sure whether that’s some bug specific to my machine or to my macOS 10.14.6.

Thanks!

2

Maybe you could do something using SwiftBar?

3

I haven’t used SwiftBar (looks like it’d have to be BitBar in my case, as I’m on Mojave). Did you mean I might get it to read some information about every minimized item and dump a report into menu bar? Or some other idea?

4

Yes, that was kinda my idea. You’d probably have to use AppleScript, as I’m not aware of any shell commands that would help.

5

I have a javascript bookmarklet that lets you rename tabs (temporarily — it doesn’t persist if you close the tab and then reopen the site). Not sure if you could somehow combine that with other techniques to keep better track of tabs with similarly named pages

6

Sure, any bit helps since there doesn’t seem to be much available to augment what I’m trying to augment.

7

Here’s what you put into the address/URL field for a bookmark:


javascript:document.title=prompt('Title:',document.title)||document.title;void%201

Then when you “open” the bookmark (I put them in the browser bookmark’s bar) it’ll let you rename the tab.

Can be adapted to other javascript workflows.

I got it from here: Tab Aliaser bookmarklets: rename and label tabs and pages • mozillaZine Forums