Explicit Action Pattern</th>	Modal Design</th> </tr>
Initial Search</b></div> </form> </form> </form> </form> </td>	All</b></label> movie</label> music</label> ebook</label> </form> </td> </tr>
Search results...</b></div> </form> </form> </td>	All</b></label> movie</label> music</label> ebook</label> </form> </td> </tr> </table> As you can see in the top row, for searching an ebook, I will "flow" through the form from left to right, filling the relevant field and hitting the return key, or pressing the "Search EBook" button. But with the traditional modal design, choosing the radio button "ebook" breaks my flow of entry.</p> On the second row, you can see how I use this design for providing a "search again" form, where I can choose to enter a new search, or edit the previous one by selecting the relevant search box. It treats the search interface like a REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) rather than a static webpage. Whereas in the traditional way, I would have to break my flow to go hit the "Clear" button to empty the field.</p> Interaction flow🔗</a></h2> So, rather than breaking the flow of the interactions to set modes, you just flow seamlessly into branches of the decision tree. If we take a car driving analogy, you just choose a direction when encountering a fork in the road, rather than having to get out of the car to move a barrier before resuming your ride.</p>

Colas.Nahaboo.net - code

Save these Firefox tabs for later

2026-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

I often look for some concept out of curiority, and end up with tens of browser tabs opened on the subject, and realize that I have no time now to pursue this rabbit into his hole, end up with tons of Firefox windows with tens of tabs gathering dust (and eating RAM) on my desktop. Up to now I just created Foswiki pages or Trello tasks as reminders to tackle these projects later on, but it required enough manual work to often postpone doing it and either losing the info or be swamped in thousands of tabs. And saving them as Firefox bookmarks was cumbersome and required lots of manual management.

What I decided to do is a simple way to save all these tabs offline, and be able to re-open the window simply. I bundle them into what I call .ffst files (for FireFox Saved Tabs), simple text files of one url per line, into a ~/firefox-savedtabs/</code> directory.

Saving a set of tabs: Select the tabs (click on the first one, shift-click on the last one)</li> Open the right-mouse-button menu on a tab, and select Copy URLs</code></li> Create a new file (e.g: some-name.ffst</code>) in the ~/firefox-savedtabs/</code> directory with your favorite editor,</li> Paste the tabs into it,</li> Save.</li> </ul> </li> Restoring the tabs into a new window: either by: running the script below firefox-savedtabs-restore</code> without arguments, and choosing which file to restore.</li> running the script with the ffst file as argument: firefox-savedtabs-restore some-name.ffst</code></li> Browsing the directory ~/firefox-savedtabs/</code> in a file explorer window, and choosing to open the .ffst file with Firefox SavedTabs restore</code> once you have created the ~/.local/share/applications/firefox-savedtabs.desktop</code> file below</li> </ul> </li> </ul> I can thus just mention the .ffstr file in my various "todo" places (TODO lists, TODO files, pinboard, wikis, trello, ...) Note that you can adapt this to any browser, and choose whatever directory name and file extension you want. Updating the tabs is just re-copying the urls and re-pasting in the file. The two scripts are:🔗</a></h2> /usr/local/bin/firefox-savedtabs-restore🔗</a></h3> Note that you can modify in it the restore</code> function to use with another browser. #!/bin/bash # shellcheck disable=SC1090,SC2155,SC2046 # source files, declare&assign # restore saved tabs bundles (text files of urls, one per line) dir="$HOME/firefox-savedtabs/" restore(){ mapfile -t urls <"$1" firefox --new-window "${urls[@]}" exit 0 } if [[ $# == 0 ]]; then # Without args, list the saves, most recent first, and prompt to restore echo "In ~/.firefox-savedtabs/" cd "$dir" || exit 1 select i in $(find . -type f -name \*.ffst \ -printf '%TY-%Tm-%Td.%THh%TM:%TS %h/%f\n' | \ sed -e 's| [.]/|_|' | sort -r | \ sed -re 's/:[0-9]{2}[.][0-9]*//'); do restore "${i#*_}" done else # with a file name or path, restore the window file="$1" if [[ -e "$file" ]]; then restore "$file" elif ! [[ -e "$file" ]] && [[ -e "$dir/$file" ]]; then file="$dir/$file" restore "$file" else echo "***Error: file not found: \"$file\" in $dir" exit 1 fi fi</code></pre>~/.local/share/applications/firefox-savedtabs.desktop🔗</a></h3> [Desktop Entry] Name=Firefox SavedTabs restore # update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications/ Exec=/usr/local/bin/firefox-savedtabs-restore %u Type=Application Terminal=false MimeType=x-scheme-handler/x-firefox-savedtabs;</code></pre>

Converting Zola pages from TOML to YAML 2026-04-07T00:00:00+00:00 Since Zola</a> now supports frontmatter in its markdown pages in the YAML</a> format in addition to the original TOML</a>, I decided to migrate all my pages to YAML, as it is both easier to read and write for humans, and natively understood by a majority of tools (Emacs, marktext, obsidian, vs-code, typos, zettlt...) So I wrote a small bash script for the conversion, site-toml2yaml</code> (all my personal site management tools start with the prefix site-</code> for taking advantage of the tab-completion). It should run on any Linux or Unix system, and it requires dasel</a> and the usual gang: grep, sed, head... Note that you could also use hugo convert</a>, but I haven't tested it. You can grab it at my zola-tools repository</a>. This repository is quite empty for now, but I will use it to publish the various small tools I use to maintain this public site. Usage🔗</a></h2> site-toml2yaml md-files or directories... Converts in place the frontmatter of Markdown files from TOML to YAML. It recurses in directories, but looking only for *.md</code> files and sub-dirs. Without argument, run on ${ZOLA_ROOT}/content/</code> Should work on any Markdown files with TOML frontmatter. You should only run it on your content/ dir normally. For instance running it on your themes/ dir will risk messing your imported themes WARNING: it modifies the files in place, so MAKE A BACKUP before running it! Why converting to YAML?🔗</a></h2> TOML is arguably a better configuration file format</a> than YAML, but only if you want to use it as a simpler JSON, i.e. a well-specified, unambiguous way to represent any data. However, I feel that for the simple and limited use case of Zola pages frontmatter, it is overkill and thus a real pain to read and edit by hand. Let's take an example: TOML</h3> [table1] foo = "bar" [table1.nested_table] baz = "bat" [[comments]] author = "Nate" text = "Great Article!" [[comments]] author = "Anonymous" text = "Love it!"</code></pre></div> YAML</h3> comments: - author: Nate text: Great Article! - author: Anonymous text: Love it! table1: foo: bar nested_table: baz: bat</code></pre></div> </div> See? Especially for people like me with a Unix culture, the YAML format seems both more natural (resembling the format of email or HTTP headers, the use of indentation à la Python), and TOML has a repulsive Windows flavor. Add to this that most of the tools I use understand natively YAML frontmatter but not TOML, and the decision is easy. Explicit Action Pattern keeps you in the flow 2026-04-05T00:00:00+00:00 When designing interfaces for tools for my personal use, I have been using what I call an Explicit Action Pattern, the opposite of modal design. Due to the general trend towards minimalism of modern UI practice, it is not used a lot, but I think it should, and here is why. Examples🔗</a></h2> Explicit Action Pattern</th> Modal Design</th> </tr> Initial Search</div> </form> </form> </form> </form> </td> All</label> movie</label> music</label> ebook</label> </form> </td> </tr> Search results...</div> </form> </form> </td> All</label> movie</label> music</label> ebook</label> </form> </td> </tr> </table> As you can see in the top row, for searching an ebook, I will "flow" through the form from left to right, filling the relevant field and hitting the return key, or pressing the "Search EBook" button. But with the traditional modal design, choosing the radio button "ebook" breaks my flow of entry. On the second row, you can see how I use this design for providing a "search again" form, where I can choose to enter a new search, or edit the previous one by selecting the relevant search box. It treats the search interface like a REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) rather than a static webpage. Whereas in the traditional way, I would have to break my flow to go hit the "Clear" button to empty the field. Interaction flow🔗</a></h2> So, rather than breaking the flow of the interactions to set modes, you just flow seamlessly into branches of the decision tree. If we take a car driving analogy, you just choose a direction when encountering a fork in the road, rather than having to get out of the car to move a barrier before resuming your ride.