osa-chrome.el is an Emacs Mac port interface to Google Chrome.

The current focus is on ultra-fast tab manipulation that scales to huge numbers of tabs. More functionality may be added in future releases.

Features

• Fetching all tabs (URLs/titles) from all windows belonging to all currently running Chrome processes.
• Setting the current tab, optionally switching focus to Chrome, for any tab from any window belonging to any currently running Chrome process.
• Custom tab views: by pid, duplicates, marked, active. Independent from filtering.
• Filters, views and tab display can be extended or replaced with alternative implementations.
• Tracking, displaying and rapid switching between all active (currently selected) tabs in Chrome.
• Marking/unmarking for tab-at-point, tabs in region or all visible tabs. Marks persist across filtering / limiting operations, until explicitly removed.
• Rapid filtering based on typed regular expression
• Switch between viewing URLs or titles at any point
• Copy URL
• Delete tab-at-point or all marked tabs
• View HTML source of any tab
• Emacs Lisp API on top of a basic data model
• Strong focus on performance

Performance

osa-chrome.el was designed upfront with heavy emphasis on performance. I use Chrome through my chrome-private wrapper and generate hundreds of disposable profiles every day. Some of these profiles are segmented / tied to particular areas of research and kept around for as long as they’re needed. They can grow to contain hundreds and add up to thousands of tabs in total.

osa-chrome.el allows me to keep up with this volume of information and effortlessly manipulate it since it’s at least an order of magnitude faster than the alternatives: Rather that calling out to a separate osascript process and either parsing strings or JSON, osa-chrome.el works directly on top of Apple Events through an Emacs Lisp bridge.

The JXA code that is used to interface with Chrome has been written from scratch to take full advantage of batch operations and lazy-evaluation through selectors in order to minimize communication roundtrips.

I used the excellent Elfeed as an inspiration for the user interface, and tried to shorten the feedback loop as much as possible (e.g. by not using the minibuffer).

Install

Requires osa.el.

Simple and most flexible method:

;; Clone this repository, ensure directory of osa-chrome.el is in your
;; load-path and add the following to your init file:
(require 'osa-chrome)

Alternatively, you can install through MELPA or some other Emacs package manager.

Usage

Interactively

M-x osa-chrome

C-h m ; to see mode documentation and default keybindings.

If you have Chrome windows spread out across multiple spaces, you will not be able to focus/raise windows that exist in non-currently-visible spaces. This seems to be a “System Events” limitation, since it doesn’t expose the necessary functionality. Do let me know if you have a workaround.

I don’t use or have plans to add direct support for Helm or other similar completion frameworks. That can be easily accomplished and kept external to the package, through the Emacs Lisp API that osa-chrome.el exposes.

Together with Bas Alberts, we ported most of the functionality of osa-chrome.el to effectively every operating system that Chrome and Emacs run on, using the DevTools protocol provided by Chrome: chrome.el.

Regarding other browsers, Firefox does not expose any OSA endpoints whatsoever and Safari does not expose unique tab ids. Writing a similar mode for Safari is possible but lack of unique ids means more complicated code, and since I am not using Safari, I have no incentive to support it.

Configuration

The default configuration will use “Google Chrome” as the application name and operate in single instance mode. If you are using Google Chrome Canary, change osa-chrome-application-name accordingly.

Single instance mode means that tabs will be retrieved from a single Chrome instance (including all windows belonging to that instance). If you don’t run multiple independent Chrome instances, this is what you want and no further configuration is needed.

If you use my chrome-private wrapper or run concurrent independent Chrome instances, you need to set osa-chrome-single-instance to nil and enable Remote Apple Events in System Preferences -> Sharing which should also be restricted to a specific user (will require authentication over TLS). You can also enable the firewall and either tick “Block all incoming connections” or add a custom PF anchor for fine-grained control. Finally, you need to configure osa-chrome-machine-url by either:

• Leaving it empty but having an appropriate entry in authinfo:

machine localhost port eppc login user password pass

where user and pass correspond to the username/password of the user that is allowed to authenticate for Remote Apple Events.

or

• Setting it to “eppc://user:password@localhost” with the same information.

It is unfortunate that one has to go through all these steps, but enabling Remote Apple Events is the only way I know of that allows for per-PID application control. Finally, let me reiterate that this is not needed unless one is using multiple independent Chrome instances at the same time.

Note

Does not work with official GNU Emacs for macOS (or emacsformacosx.com) as it does not expose an Apple Event API.

You need Yamamoto Mitsuharu’s excellent Emacs Mac port, which can also be found in MacPorts and Homebrew.

License

This repository uses 2 different licenses:

• All files in the ‘scripts’ directory use a public-domain equivalent license
• All other files use a 2-clause BSD license

Author

xristos (AT) sdf (DOT) org

Thanks to Bas Alberts for testing.