LinkThing is an extension that enhances your control over how links on web pages are opened. If, like me, you obsess over tiny details of your Macintosh browsing experience, you may find LinkThing useful. If not, you’ll probably wonder what’s wrong with me.
Here’s what LinkThing can do for you:
New tab positioning
When you Command-click a link in Safari to open the link in a new tab, Safari puts the new tab at the right end of the tab bar. If you would rather have the new tab open next to the current tab, LinkThing is your friend. You can choose whether to have new tabs from links open to the left of the current tab, to the right of the current tab, or at the end. These options can be found in the extensions area of Safari’s Preferences window.
Personally, I like to have new tabs open to the left of the current. That way, when I close the new tab, Safari returns me to the original tab, regardless of where the tab is on the tab bar.
Opening links in new tabs by default
If you find yourself Command-clicking links on a particular site almost all the time, LinkThing can save you the trouble of holding down the Command key with every click. You can tell LinkThing to open all links on the current site in new tabs by default, or just offsite links (that is, links that go to other sites). You’ll find these options in the “Settings for Current Site” tab of LinkThing’s settings dialog.
There’s also a global tab opening setting, to have LinkThing open all or offsite links on ALL sites in new tabs by default. You’ll find this setting in the “General Settings” tab of LinkThing’s settings dialog. You can override the global setting on a per-site basis using the “Settings for Current Site” tab, as described above.
Note: If one of these options is set, Command-clicking means the opposite of what it normally means—so Command-clicking in this case will open a link in the current tab.
Opening links with a right-click
If you’ve ever wished there were a way to open links in new tabs without having to hold down the Command key or use the context menu, now there is. With the appropriate LinkThing option enabled, you can simulate a Command-click on a link by right-clicking it. Instead of showing the links’s context menu, Safari will just open the link in a new tab. Don’t worry—you can still access a link’s context menu by Control-clicking it.
Send links to Instapaper
After entering your Instapaper account info in the LinkThing section of Safari’s preferences window, you can right-click any link and select “Add Link to Instapaper” to instantly add the link to your Instapaper account for later reading.
Lightweight “status bar”
As a bonus, LinkThing also includes an optional “pseudo status bar” feature. As with other extensions that are dedicated to this kind of feature, you can turn off Safari’s status bar to save screen space, without losing the ability to peek at the URLs of links. The feature works by showing link URLs in a little bar that only appears at the bottom of the window while the mouse is over a link. As soon as you move the mouse away from a link, the little bar disappears. LinkThing’s pseudo status bar is very lightweight—it doesn’t do anything fancy, like showing favicons or resolving shortened URLs, as some of the dedicated extensions do. But if you don’t need those kinds of features, this option may be all you need.
More screenshots
2010 Canisbos Computing
