Setup Recipes

Every other part of this manual is organized by feature — Current Tabs, Bookmark Search, Cloud Backup. This part is organized the other way around: by goal. Each recipe below starts from something you're actually trying to do and lists exactly which settings to combine, with the real default values, so you don't have to piece it together yourself from separate feature pages.

1. I can't find the Settings page

There's no gear icon inside the side panel itself — Settings is reached through Chrome's own extension surface, not from within the sidebar. Two ways in:

1. Right-click the toolbar icon. Below the five X-Power Plus items (Show/Hide Sidebar Nav, Show/Hide Floating Button, and the three freeze commands — see recipe 3 and the context menu reference), Chrome adds its own built-in entries after a divider, including Options. Click it to open Settings in a new tab.
2. Or go through chrome://extensions. Find X-Power Plus, click Details, then Extension options. This path always works, even if the toolbar icon is unpinned or hidden in the extensions overflow menu.

2. I want the sidebar to take up less room on screen

Four independent controls stack together, from least to most aggressive:

Switching Bookmarks to Compact row density and using Cluster instead of Group in Current Tabs (no native tab-group chrome to render) both help too, if the density is coming from long lists rather than the chrome around them.

3. I need to hide everything before a screen share, fast

1. Switch Privacy Mode to Level 3 in whichever panel is open — Current Tabs, History, or the Efficiency Dashboard — each is set independently, so check the one you're about to have on screen.
2. Right-click the toolbar icon → Show/Hide Floating Button, if you'd rather the in-page quick-action icon not be visible in the share either.
3. For a completely blank slate, also toggle Show/Hide Sidebar Nav from the same menu so no tab labels are visible at all, just the content you intend to show.

All three are independent toggles, so once the call ends, switch each back the same way — nothing was changed permanently or lost in the meantime.

4. The same handful of sites, every single morning

This is exactly what Spaces exist for. Create one, then:

• Add each site by capturing the current tab, or import an entire bookmark folder if you already have one for this purpose.
• Turn on Pin tabs so every tab the Space opens is pinned automatically, and Pin to top so the Space itself is always the first thing you see.
• One click launches the whole set from then on — no more opening each site by hand.

5. I have thirty tabs open and no idea what's what anymore

1. Switch Current Tabs to Domain view to collapse same-site tabs under one heading, or Parent-child view if the mess is really a dozen link-clicks deep from three or four original tabs.
2. If you remember content but not which tab it's in, turn on Content Search and search with content: instead of scanning titles.
3. Once you've identified what's actually taking up space, Quick Close clears every tab from one domain in a single click.

6. My laptop's fan won't stop

Turn on auto-freeze. Out of the box it's already tuned conservatively — the defaults are:

If a specific page needs to keep running in the background regardless (a long upload, a dashboard polling for updates), add it to the freeze whitelist — enabled by default, empty until you add something to it — rather than turning auto-freeze off entirely.

7. I keep watching videos far longer than I meant to

This is the Take a Break Reminder, and its defaults are tuned to be a nudge, not a wall:

If the default hour feels too generous or too strict, this is a per-setting change, not an all-or-nothing switch — lower the threshold for the sites you know you binge on, and leave it alone otherwise.

8. I want new bookmarks to organize themselves

1. Open Auto-Tag Rules and either start from the nine built-in starter rules or write your own — Domain Match covers most cases on its own.
2. Use the rule preview before saving, so you see exactly how many existing bookmarks would match and a sample of which ones.
3. Lock any bookmark you've tagged carefully by hand so future rule runs leave it alone — see Bookmark Locking.

9. I want to clean up years of bookmark rot in one sitting

1. Run the dead-link check first — Free plan covers 200 bookmarks per run, so run it more than once on a large collection.
2. Run Duplicate Detection next, starting with Full URL matching (the safest, least ambiguous mode) before trying looser modes like Title Similarity.
3. Delete with confidence — anything you remove lands in the Recycle Bin first, not gone for good immediately.

10. I'm switching to a new computer

1. On the old machine: export a local backup covering everything, or confirm your Google Drive cloud backups are current.
2. On the new machine: install the extension, then import the local backup file, or connect the same Google account and restore from a cloud backup.
3. Either way, import merges rather than replaces — restoring onto a fresh install is exactly as safe as restoring onto one that already has some data in it.

11. I'm worried a scheduled check might cry wolf during a real outage

The dead-link checker's scheduled runs already have two built-in safeguards for this: a pre-check connectivity beacon confirms you're actually online before a run starts, and an overall failure-rate safeguard skips the run if too much of it looks like a network outage rather than genuinely broken links. You don't need to configure anything extra to get this protection — it's worth knowing it's there before you trust a "200 dead bookmarks" notification at face value.

12. I want one search box to answer a very specific question

If you're about to type a plain keyword and stop yourself because "that's not quite what I mean," it's usually one of the eight syntax prefixes instead. Type :help in the box you're in for the exact list valid there, or see the full Bookmark Search Syntax reference for all eight side by side.