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I need to have different set of open tabs and tab groups for each of my tasks.

Import and export setting not helping me to do this, neither does this SO question that has been asked similarly but for windows/tools layout - i.e. NOT for the tabs/tab-groups.

How can I save and restore the saved set?

Community
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Nam G VU
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5 Answers5

20

Late to the party here but it popped up pretty high in my google search for this kind of thing so I'll drop my find: Save All The Tabs.

Mushkov
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17

One Marketplace Extension that works with Visual Studio 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2019 is the Workspace Manager.

One additional tip: after installing it and adding the toolbar, you might have to restart VS again until it fully works (see Q & A). At least I had to do so in VS 2019 (16.1.3).

Dejan
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  • Needed to restart VS 2017 after adding the toolbar for it to be able to save. – Doug Domeny Oct 22 '20 at 20:48
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    - need to enable it as a toolbar post-installation as per https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=AndreyVeselov.WorkspaceManager&ssr=false#overview - needed to restart *twice* (as per Q&A there) in the beginning for its save functionality to work – gawkface Feb 02 '21 at 23:07
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    I installed the Workspace Manager extension and it saved my screen configuration (i.e. which panels I had open: solution explorer etc.) but it didn't save document groups. – Gerald LeRoy Oct 27 '21 at 08:09
10

You can save open documents and later reopen them as a group with the Favorite Documents extension.

Sergey Vlasov
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  • Thanks. This greatly help to save opened tabs. But not with the tab groups. – Nam G VU Oct 18 '13 at 02:10
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    @Sergey: Great extension. Still it isn't really usable for me for one reason: I've added all open tabs to a favorite group, but it does not save the group in the order in which the tabs were displayed. For my workflow the tab order is very important. Also the pinned-status is lost, but that would be a minor issue. Would be a winner if the order was maintained! – Majnu May 30 '14 at 06:33
  • This didn't work well for me. It's unable to save groups of tabs. That is all I'm looking for. – ChrisRich Jan 14 '21 at 12:30
3

Really late to the party but ContextKeeper plugin will do the job. Supports VS 2022/2019/2017/2015/2013.

It's an extension to quickly save and restore sets of document tabs and its metadata. The "session", similar to Vim's :mksession command, is defined as:

  • last opened/favorites files
  • documents (tabs with code) positions, state and order
  • tabs groups (including horizontal/vertical orientation)
  • remembers line and column for every opened tab
  • remembers breakpoints & bookmarks for every opened file

It also has a powerful git integration - automatically saves and restores context when switching between branches.

All contexts are saved to simple JSON files.

Piotr Karczmarz
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If you accidentally came here looking for a VS Code solution, from the same author of Save All The Tabs (for Visual Studio) that MushKov shared in this answer:

  1. Restore Editors extension
  2. press Ctrl/Cmd+K and Ctrl/Cmd+E to access the editors/tab menu

Restore Editors VS Code extension by Eric Amodio

CPHPython
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