Tabs and spaces

Tabs hold pages. Spaces hold tabs. Use a space for each area of your life or work, such as Work, Trips or Research. Each space has its own tabs, and switching spaces swaps the whole list.

Open, close and switch tabs

To open a new tab, press ⌘T (Ctrl+T), or choose New Tab from the Browser menu (macOS) or the command palette.
To close the current tab, press ⌘W (Ctrl+W).
To bring back a closed tab, press ⇧⌘T (Ctrl+Shift+T).
To go to the next or previous tab, press ⇧⌘] or ⇧⌘[ (Ctrl+Shift+] or Ctrl+Shift+[). Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab work too.
To jump to a tab by position, press ⌘1 to ⌘8. ⌘9 always selects the last tab.
To copy the page address of the current tab, press ⇧⌘C (Ctrl+Shift+C).

Pin a tab

Pinned tabs sit at the top of the sidebar and stay put.

To pin or unpin the current tab, press ⌘D (Ctrl+D).
You can also click the pin control on a tab row. For a pinned tab, that control unpins it.

Pinned tabs never go to sleep. See Tab sleep and Peek.

See every tab at once

Press ⇧⌘A (Ctrl+Shift+A) to open All tabs. It shows the tabs of every space as cards.

Type to filter the cards.
Use the arrow keys to move between cards and Enter to open one.
Press Delete to close a card's tab, or P to pin it.
To move a tab to another space, drag its card onto that space.

Each card also shows how many requests were blocked on that tab.

Create and switch spaces

To create a space, press ⌥⌘N (Ctrl+Alt+N), or click + in the space switcher. On macOS, you can also use Browser > New Space.
To go to the next or previous space, press ⌥⌘↓ or ⌥⌘↑ (Ctrl+Alt+Down or Ctrl+Alt+Up).
To switch directly, click a space in the switcher at the bottom of the sidebar.

In the Native look, the switcher is a segmented control with one segment per space. With more than four spaces, the inactive segments show only the first letter.

Rename, reorder and close a space

To rename the active space, press F2. On macOS, you can also use Browser > Rename Space…. Type the new name and press Enter. Esc cancels.
To move the active space, use Browser > Move Space Left or Move Space Right (macOS only).
To close the active space, use Browser > Close Space (macOS only).
To give the active space an icon, open the command palette (⌘K / Ctrl+K) and choose Change space icon…, or use Browser > Icon on macOS. Choose None to remove it.

Your tabs come back

After a normal quit, Island restores your spaces, tabs and split pairs on the next launch. Plan and Report tabs from Research are the exception: their pages come back as ordinary tabs.