Bulk Tab Actions: Change Many Tabs at Once

## Why it matters

Without bulk actions, managing a hundred tabs means changing each one individually. Open the tab, click the icon, close it, repeat. Bulk actions let you work on groups instead. Tick five tabs to close, click close once, they all disappear. Tick a batch of research tabs, group them all in one action, and suddenly they are under a coloured pill instead of scattered across your bar.

The time saving adds up. A reporter gathering news sources might tick fifty tabs that mention a breaking story, then close them all at once when the story breaks. A developer who accidentally opened duplicates of the same page can tick the spares and close the lot in a single step. You stop repeating yourself.

## How it works

Bulk actions work through two different scopes. Selection scope acts only on the tabs you tick manually. Filter scope acts on every tab matching your current search, whether you ticked it or not. A toggle in the action bar lets you pick which scope to use before you run the action.

The actions themselves sit in the toolbar above your tab list. Each one targets tabs you select: close removes them, pin and unpin change their pinned state, mute and unmute silence them, move sends them to another window, group gathers them under a coloured pill, and ungroup scatters them back. Behind each action is a Chrome API call. Close uses chrome.tabs.remove(), pinning uses chrome.tabs.update() with the pinned flag, muting uses chrome.tabs.update() with mutedInfo, moving uses chrome.tabs.move(), and grouping uses chrome.tabs.group().

When you close more than one tab at once, the extension asks you to confirm. This stops you from wiping a batch of tabs by accident. You can turn this confirm step off if you are confident and want the action to run instantly.

Selecting fast matters when your filter shows dozens of matches. The select-all control at the top ticks every tab in the current filter, not just the ones visible on screen. Click it once to tick them all, click it again to untick.

## What does not matter

You do not need to be in the full window view to use bulk actions. The toolbar popup has the same controls, so a quick bulk close works without opening the manager in a separate tab. The popup closes the moment you click another window, which can interrupt a multi-window action, but single-window bulk actions run fine before the popup shuts.

Bulk actions do not change how Chrome remembers your tabs. Closed tabs still appear in the recently-closed menu, so you can undo a close. Pinned tabs keep their pinned status when you move them, and groups stay together when you move grouped tabs, so you do not lose structure in the move.

## Code example

Here is how the extension builds the list of tabs an action will touch, depending on scope:

async function getTargetTabs(useFilterScope) {
  if (useFilterScope) {
    // Filter scope: every tab matching the current search
    const query = getCurrentSearchQuery();
    const allTabs = await chrome.tabs.query({});
    return allTabs.filter(tab => 
      matchesSearch(tab, query)
    );
  } else {
    // Selection scope: only the ticked tabs
    return getTicked Tabs();
  }
}

// Then apply the action:
async function closeTabs(tabs) {
  const tabIds = tabs.map(t => t.id);
  if (tabIds.length > 1) {
    const confirmed = await askUserToConfirm(
      `Close ${tabIds.length} tabs?`
    );
    if (!confirmed) return;
  }
  await chrome.tabs.remove(tabIds);
}
Copy

## How Scalpel Manage Tabs shows it

Scalpel Manage Tabs surfaces bulk actions in the toolbar above your tab list, once you tick at least one tab. A set of coloured buttons appears: close, pin/unpin, mute/unmute, move, group, ungroup. A toggle next to them switches between selection scope and filter scope, and shows exactly how many tabs the next action will touch. When you click an action that affects more than one tab, a confirmation prompt asks you to confirm. The settings panel has a checkbox to turn confirmations off if you want the action to run instantly.