Tabs

The sidebar

Tabs are listed vertically in the sidebar. Each shows the site's initial on its theme colour and the page title.

Links that open a new window (target="_blank", window.open) open as a new tab next to the one they came from. ⌘-click a link to open it in the background, or ⌥-click it to peek at it over the page. Sign-in pop-ups keep working because the page that opened them can still reach them.

When you close the last tab, the window closes.

Reopening closed tabs

⇧⌘T brings back the tab you closed last, then the one before, up to 25. It comes back where it was: in its room (switching there), at its place in the sidebar, with its back/forward history, scroll position, zoom and name. The command palette lists the last ten as Reopen …, to pick one.

Tabs of a deleted room can be reopened too; they open in the current room.

Text you typed

Litr remembers the text you last typed into a box on a page (a comment, a message, a post; at least 40 characters, never a single-line field such as a password). If the page loads again before it was sent, because it was reloaded, failed with an error, crashed, or the tab was closed and reopened with ⇧⌘T, and the text isn't on the new page, a strip above the page offers it back:

• Put Back puts it in the box it came from, or the one empty box on the page. If there's none, it's copied instead.
• Copy copies it, to paste where you like.
• Not Now lets it go.

The text is only in Litr's memory: never written to disk, gone when Litr quits, and offered only on the site it was typed on, for an hour. A text that shows up on the new page (a comment that was posted) isn't offered. Forget tabs are left out. Forget tabs are never kept, and the list is forgotten when Litr quits.

Tabs belong to a room. The sidebar shows the current room's tabs; the strip at its bottom switches rooms.

Pinned tabs

Pinned tabs are for sites you always keep open, such as mail or a dashboard. They sit at the top of the sidebar under Pinned.

• Pin or unpin the current tab with ⇧⌘P (Tabs → Pin/Unpin Tab).
• Drag a tab onto a pinned tab to pin it. Drag a pinned tab down among the others to unpin it.
• Closing a pinned tab doesn't remove it. It is unloaded and goes back to the address it was pinned with.
• Pinned tabs are always restored, even when tab restore is off.
• A name of your own (✎ on the tab) is kept when a pinned tab goes back to its pinned address, so "Mail" stays "Mail" whatever the page calls itself.

Folders

Folders keep pinned tabs together: a client's sites, a project's dashboards, what you're reading.

• Make one with + Folder next to Pinned (hover it), Tabs → New Folder, or the command palette. Type its name and press Enter.
• Put a tab in it by dragging the tab onto the folder; a tab that wasn't pinned is pinned. Drag a tab onto another in the folder to put it there, in that place.
• Take a tab out by dragging it onto a pinned tab outside the folder, or down among the other tabs to unpin it.
• Click a folder to fold it away; the number shows how many tabs it holds. The tab you're on stays in view even in a folded folder. Double-click renames it; × (hover it) deletes it, leaving its tabs pinned.
• Folders belong to the room they're in, as pinned tabs do.

Favorites

Favorites are pinned tabs shown as tiles with the site's icon, four to a row, above the pinned list: the handful of sites you open all day. Each room holds up to 12 (three rows).

• Add one by dragging a tab up to Favorites, or with Tabs → Add to/Remove from Favorites (also in the command palette). While you drag a tab and there are no favorites yet, a box saying Drop here for Favorites shows where to drop it.
• Click a tile to go to it; hover it to see its title. Middle-click closes it the way a pinned tab closes: it's unloaded and goes back to its pinned address.
• Drag tiles to reorder them. Drag one onto a pinned tab to keep it pinned but not a favorite, or down among the other tabs to unpin it.
• Favorites belong to the room they're in, like pinned tabs.

Site icons

Tabs and Favorites show each site's own icon. Litr asks the page which icon is its own, or fetches /apple-touch-icon.png or /favicon.ico from the site for tabs that haven't loaded yet, and keeps it on your Mac for a week. Forget tabs keep no icons, and show their violet mark instead.

Pull Requests

With the GitHub CLI installed and signed in (gh auth login in Terminal), a Pull Requests folder in the sidebar lists your open pull requests and those waiting for your review, review requests first:

• A mark on the icon shows how the latest commit's checks went: ✓ passed, ✕ failed, ● still running.
• Under the title: the repository, Review and who wrote it when someone asked for your review, or Draft.
• Click one to go to its tab, or open it in a new one.
• Click Pull Requests to fold the folder away; ↻ (hover the folder) asks GitHub again. Litr asks by itself every five minutes.

Litr asks GitHub through gh, so it never holds a GitHub token itself. Without gh, there's no folder. Turn it off with Pull Requests in the sidebar in settings.

Renaming a tab

Hover a tab and click ✎, double-click it, or choose Tabs → Rename Tab… (also in the command palette). Type a name and press Enter; Esc keeps the old one, and clicking elsewhere keeps what you typed. Leave the name empty to go back to the page's own title. The name is saved with your tabs.

How Litr saves memory

Each loaded tab has its own web view, and pages can use a lot of memory. Litr keeps as few of them as it can:

• A new or restored tab has no web view until you show it.
• Only the active tab is in the window. Background pages are suspended (macOS 14 and later) or throttled, and their drawing buffers are released.
• Litr keeps within a memory limit: 1 GB by default for Litr and its pages together. When the total goes over, the heaviest background tab is unloaded, one at a time, every few seconds until it fits. You can choose 500 MB to 3 GB, or turn the limit off.
• At most three tabs stay loaded, the active one included. Opening more unloads the ones you used least recently. You can choose 1–6 in settings.
• Background tabs are unloaded after five minutes without use. You can choose 1 minute to 1 hour, or never.
• When macOS reports memory pressure, every background tab is unloaded at once.

Tabs that play sound or are in a call (using the camera or microphone) are never unloaded automatically, by the limit, the timer or memory pressure. They show ♪ in the sidebar; click it to mute the tab (see Media). Close them yourself when you are done. A tab whose video is in picture in picture isn't unloaded either.

Unloaded tabs look dimmed in the sidebar. An unloaded tab keeps its address, title, colour, zoom level, back/forward history and scroll position, so clicking it brings the page back where you left it. It reloads from the network, so a page with unsaved form input may lose it.

Switching to an unloaded tab still looks instant. When you leave a tab, Litr takes a picture of it, and when you come back it shows that picture while the page reloads underneath, then fades it away once the page is ready (at most four seconds). The pictures are small JPEGs of about 100 KB each, and they are saved with your tabs, so restored tabs look instant after a restart too.

If a tab is unloaded while you are looking at it (by a schedule), the page area says so. Click it or press ⌘R to load it again.

Seeing memory use

Each loaded tab shows its memory in the sidebar, for example 412 MB. Unloaded tabs show nothing, because they use none. At the bottom of the sidebar, Memory shows Litr's total against the limit, such as "815 MB of 1.0 GB". The bar turns orange near the limit and red over it. It stays red when the active tab and tabs that play sound need more than the limit, since Litr won't unload those.

The figure for each tab is its web page process's memory, the same number Activity Monitor shows. Tabs from the same site can share a process; the total counts each process once. Litr's total leaves out WebKit's shared networking and graphics processes.

Under the meter, Litr says how many tabs are asleep (unloaded) and about how much memory that gave back, such as "12 tabs asleep · about 1.8 GB freed": the sum of what each used when it was unloaded. Tabs not loaded since Litr started weren't measured, and count as asleep but add nothing.

Turn the numbers off with Show memory use in settings.

Energy use

A tab that works hard (15% or more) shows its CPU use in the sidebar in place of its memory, for example ⚡42%: a percentage of one core, as in Activity Monitor. Under the memory meter, CPU then shows the total for Litr and its pages.

When a tab you aren't looking at keeps using a lot of energy for a minute (30% or more, not playing sound or in a call), a strip under the toolbar says so:

• Unload It unloads the tab. It reloads where you left off when you go back to it.
• Leave It keeps it running and stops asking about that tab.

On battery

With Save energy on battery on (the default), when your Mac runs on battery or in Low Power Mode, Litr:

• unloads background tabs after 2 minutes (or your own setting, if shorter),
• keeps at most 2 tabs loaded,
• unloads a background tab that keeps using a lot of energy, without asking, and says so.

Under the memory meter, CPU · saving energy shows while this is on. Plug in and your own settings apply again.

Restoring tabs

Litr saves your tabs as you go and restores them the next time it starts, all unloaded except the one you were on. Turn this off with Restore tabs on launch in settings; pinned tabs are restored either way.