curator

A home for the browser tabs you can't afford to lose — the webmail, chat and dashboards you keep open all day — where nothing else can bury them. You list those tabs in a config file; curator keeps each one in a sidebar, signed in, and sends every other link to your normal browser, so the set never fills with clutter.

Why

Important tabs (mail, calendar, dashboards) get buried in a sea of browser windows. Firefox pinned tabs are the closest workaround, but the pinned window itself gets lost and keeping it clean is constant manual work. curator gives keeper tabs a distinct, stable home that lives outside the window pile and never accumulates cruft: curation is file-driven, everything else is ephemeral.

Install

Download: grab curator-<version>-macos.zip from the latest release, unzip, and move curator.app to /Applications. Releases are signed and notarized.

Or build from source into ~/.curator (needs Rust and the Xcode Command Line Tools); this also seeds your config, and re-running it rebuilds from the latest source:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lockyc/curator/main/install.sh | bash

curator updates itself: on launch, every 6 hours, and from curator ▸ Check for Updates…, an Update available bar offers Update & Relaunch. Nothing installs without your approval, and each update's signature is checked first.

First run

Launch curator with no config and its home screen offers Create a starter config, which writes a minimal one to ~/.config/curator/config.toml (never over an existing file). For the fuller two-window example, copy examples/config.toml there instead. Edit the file and save: the sidebar reloads, and a malformed file keeps the last good config running with an error banner. Config ▸ Edit Config opens it.

Features

• The config is the source of truth. Each [[window]] opens a window of loose tabs and named groups. There is no in-app pin or unpin; you curate by editing the file.
• Keeper tabs are home bases. Wander within a session, then snap a tab back to its URL with ⌂ (or by re-clicking it); every tab also resets on restart.
• Outside links escape to your default browser, leaving the tab where it was; links within the tab's own site stay in it. ⌘-click or middle-click opens any link outside.
• Logins persist, and can be shared or kept apart. Every tab shares one login store by default, so one sign-in covers a provider's related services. Give tabs a session name to separate accounts, or reuse one to share a login across windows.
• Live tabs. A load_on_open tab loads at launch, stays live in the background, fires native banners and rolls its unread count into the Dock badge. Other tabs stay lazy and quiet until you open them; the row's green dot unloads one.
• Unread badges come from the service's own badge count, a count in the page title, or a delivered notification. unread = "count" ignores a service's always-on "something is unread" marker (Discord's •), and unread = "off" silences a tab.
• Windows — Window ▸ New Window… (⌥⌘N) adds one, right-clicking a window's banner edits or deletes it, and a window with open_on_start = false waits in the Window menu. Closing the last open window quits curator.
• Pop a tab out (⌘⇧O) into its own window; the login survives, and closing the window returns the tab.
• The sidebar — search (⌘⇧F), collapse (⌃⌘S), ◀ ▶ ⟳ ⌂, a downloads list, and link destinations shown on hover. ⌘⇧[ / ⌘⇧] cycle the loaded tabs and ⌘1–⌘9 jump to one.

Configuration

~/.config/curator/config.toml (or the file CURATOR_CONFIG names). Loose tabs render first, then each group. Common setups — several accounts of one web app, a notification hub, an operator console, self-signed hosts — are in docs/recipes.md.

[[window]]
title = "Keepers"

  [[window.tab]]
  title = "Start"
  url   = "https://duckduckgo.com/"

  [[window.group]]
  name = "Dashboards"

    [[window.group.tab]]
    title        = "Grafana"
    url          = "https://play.grafana.org/"
    load_on_open = true
    reload_every = 5

[[window]]
title = "Comms"

  [[window.group]]
  name = "Chat"

    [[window.group.tab]]
    title        = "Mattermost"
    url          = "https://community.mattermost.com/"
    load_on_open = true

Global

Key	Default	What it does
dark_mode	false	Force dark appearance so sites honouring prefers-color-scheme render dark.
allow_insecure	[]	Hosts whose self-signed/invalid TLS certs are accepted. Hot-reloads like the rest of the config.
session	none	App-wide default login store — the bottom of the session chain (tab → window → this → built-in default). Cascades.
density	comfortable	Chrome sizing: comfortable or compact (type + spacing scaled down for denser tab lists). Hot-reloads.
sidebar_drag	true	Whether the sidebar chrome is a window-move drag handle (drag the banner/empty list area). Hot-reloads.
auto_update	true	Check for a new release on launch and every 6 hours. false suppresses the automatic checks; Check for Updates… still works. Applies to windows opened after the change.
format_on_save	false	Reformat the config in curator's house style on each clean hot-reload (same as curator fmt). A reload that fails to parse leaves the file untouched.
tab_digit_keys	jump	What ⌘1/⌘2 do in the Tab menu: jump — ⌘1–⌘9 jump to a position; cycle — ⌘1 next, ⌘2 previous, jumps shift to ⌘3–⌘9. Hot-reloads.

[[window]]

Key	Default	What it does
title	required	Window title; unique across all windows.
width / height	1500 / 1000	First-run size in logical pixels; after that curator remembers each window's size and position.
open_on_start	true	false keeps the window closed at launch, opened on demand from the Window menu or home screen. Read at launch.
open_on_launch	false	false opens the first load_on_open tab, else a blank screen; true opens the first tab even if it isn't loaded.
colour	none	#rgb / #rrggbb accent for the window-name banner at the top of the sidebar.
session	inherited from global	Default login store for this window's tabs. Cascades.

[[window.tab]] / [[window.group.tab]]

Key	Default	What it does
title	required	Display label; duplicates are allowed.
url	required	The tab's canonical URL — where ⌂ home and a reset return it.
load_on_open	false	Load when the window opens and stay live in the background, so it fires banners and reports unread while inactive.
reload_every	none	Auto-refresh the canonical URL every N minutes (positive integer).
unread	all	Which unread signals badge the row: all — every signal, including a countless marker; count — only a real number (a delivered notification still dots the row); off — never.
session	inherited from window	Login store. Tabs sharing a value share a login, even across windows. Blank falls through the chain.

[[window.group]]

Key	Default	What it does
name	required	Section header in the sidebar; unique within its window. Holds [[window.group.tab]]s.

The app binary, /Applications/curator.app/Contents/MacOS/curator, doubles as a config tool: curator validate [path] prints the resolved windows and tabs, each tab's session and any warnings, and curator fmt [--check] [path] rewrites a config in house style.

Limits

curator renders with WKWebView (Safari's engine), so browser extensions are not available. A popped-out tab reloads from its URL, so in-page state (scroll position, unsent form input) doesn't carry across.

Status

In use, 0.x. What's next: docs/FOLLOWUPS.md.

Related

curator's siblings share its sidebar, config and app shell: warden — terminals, lector — local doc sites, flotilla — document workspaces.

Development

Needs Rust and the Tauri CLI (cargo install tauri-cli --version ^2).

git clone https://github.com/lockyc/curator && cd curator
git config core.hooksPath .githooks   # once per clone: arms the pre-commit / pre-push hooks
just run      # launch against examples/config.toml (never touches your real config)
just test     # Rust tests
just gate     # the full pre-merge gate
just install  # build, install to /Applications, and relaunch

curator builds on three pinned shared crates — chrome-core (the sidebar), config-core (config primitives) and shell-core (app shell and release tooling). Working against a local checkout of one, and the release process: CLAUDE.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.