poptab

A CLI tool and library to clean up specific browser tabs.

Overview

This is a trivial CLI tool to close browser tabs whose URLs contain a given URL string.

I use it in a few projects to clean up stale tabs during development sessions.

By default, poptab is silent: it prints nothing on success, failure, or unsupported platforms, and exits 0. Pass --verbose to surface status messages, and --strict to fail hard with a non-zero exit code. This makes poptab safe to drop into cross-platform package.json scripts without cluttering output.

Getting started

Dependencies

The poptab CLI tool requires Node 20.19.0+. The exported APIs are ESM-only and share the Node 20.19.0+ requirement. Poptab is implemented in TypeScript and bundles type definitions.

It can close tabs in Chromium, Chrome, or Safari

The implementation relies on macOS-specific scripting capabilities. On Linux and Windows it is a no-op.

Installation

Invoke directly:

npx poptab

Or, install locally to access the CLI commands in a single project or to import the provided APIs:

npm install poptab

Or, install globally for access across your system:

npm install --global poptab

Usage

By default, poptab will close tabs in an open Chromium browser containing //localhost:.

Library

import { popTab } from 'poptab'

const closedTabs = await popTab({
  browser: 'chrome',
  urlContains: '127.0.0.1:',
})

console.log(`Closed ${closedTabs} tab(s)`)

CLI

Command: poptab

Close browser tabs containing a given URL string.

Usage:

poptab

| Option | Description | Type | Default | | ------------------------ | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------- | ---------------- | | --browser-b | Browser to target for tab cleanup | "chromium" "chrome" "safari" | "chromium" | | --url-contains-u | String that tab URLs must contain to be closed | string | "//localhost:" | | --strict-s | Exit with a non-zero status code on failure. Default is to exit cleanly so poptab can be safely chained in scripts (e.g. poptab && next-command). | boolean | false | | --verbose | Print status messages (successes, skips, and errors). Default is silent so poptab does not clutter script output. | boolean | false | | --help-h | Show help | boolean | | | --version-v | Show version number | boolean | |

Implementation notes

Other projects of interest:

• better-opn AppleScript approach. Eponymous NPM package seems sketchy / abandoned.
• kill-tabs This kills the processes instead of closing actual tabs.
• open-in-browser-tab Pairs with a browser extension.

Maintainers

@kitschpatrol

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome.

License

MIT © Eric Mika