CJ Eller

After musing about the command line as another interface via Matt Webb, I am reminded of a recent project from Omar Rizwan called TabFS:

TabFS is a browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer.

It takes Matt's point about the command line “as a canvas of data sources and user recombination” and applies it to the browser. Here's Omar reaffirming that idea with TabFS:

Each of your open tabs is mapped to a folder.

[...]

This gives you a ton of power, because now you can apply all the existing tools on your computer that already know how to deal with files — terminal commands, scripting languages, point-and-click explorers, etc — and use them to control and communicate with your browser.

Now you don't need to code up a browser extension from scratch every time you want to do anything. You can write a script that talks to your browser in, like, a melange of Python and bash, and you can save it as a single ordinary file that you can run whenever, and it's no different from scripting any other part of your computer.

This creates an intruiging “alternate interaction paradigm.” Just installed it and am curious about incorporating TabFS in my daily dealings with the web.