Wondering if anyone has explored how to dump tab collections to Markdown files in order to annotate and preserve them long term. This would be from things like research sessions and similar.
Most tab management browser extensions are entirely browser oriented, locked into the browser or particular proprietary data model with - at best - manual export capabilities. Something that allows dumping a collection of tabs or, ideally, a native Chrome tab group to a file and to be able to also go backward from a Markdown file or SilverBullet page to a tab group would be amazing.
I have found a limited number of tab management extensions that allow dumping tab groups to Markdown files (example), but oddly most of those don’t support moving backward from a file to a tab group. That’s useful for archiving - which is indeed helpful - but ideally such an extension would use Markdown files as the primary means of tab group storage.
There don’t appear to be any direct solutions to this problem but - as an update - I have stumbled on BrainTool as a useful browser plugin.
It is very closely aligned in philosophy both to SilverBullet generally and to my specific personal goals. It supports:
Storage via user controlled local plain text files.
Allows incremental backup for local files.
Hierarchically organized tab groups that can have additional data per group or per page.
Optionally supports storing its text data file in Google Drive.
Allows export of and control of Bookmarks from the same file.
Allows incremental import from other files and the Tabs Outliner extension backups.
The main conflict is that it uses Org Mode rather than Markdown, but it’s rather easy to convert/export Org Mode to Markdown (Org Mode has its own tool for Markdown export). If I build a script for that purpose, I will share it if there’s interest.
The feature requests I would end up registering with the extension owner:
Direct Markdown support (nice to have, but again, these are compatible formats).
Ability to directly “archive” groups to a separate file not part of the core storage. This works well with SilverBullet and similar systems, since that file can be part of long term storage rather than part of the standard working set.
Daily Journal-style working sets or integration with such files directly.
Just getting started with this, I think the exported format is very promising. If I run into obvious showstoppers, I’ll post here, but I think this is what I’m going to move forward with.