I don't need extra keyboard shortcuts and am not sure how they would help. I already have Vimium for keyboard shortcuts. My tabs are just naturally organized into logical groupings, so I can visually scan for what I want very fast. Searching is nice when you can immediately think of the appropriate search terms but it's not a replacement for a clean visual arrangement of my tabs. Another very simple benefit is that I can read the tab title text easily even with lots of tabs, something that breaks down very fast with horizontally arranged tabs.
It helps that at this point I have a lot of subconscious habits about how I arrange tabs automatically. For instance, when browsing something like HN from the front page, if a link interests me I'll middle-click the comments link first, opening it in a sub-tab. If I'm interested in the article as well, then from the comments sub-tab I'll middle-click the article link, generating a sub-sub-tab. I don't even think about this; it's just how I've browsed sites like HN for a long time at this point. I end up with a nice little structured recreation of whatever part of the homepage I'm interested in at that moment. Then, if I don't want to worry about HN right now, I just collapse the entire tree and come back to it when I want a break.
Okay, thanks, that was interesting to see your detailed usage. Maybe I just don't have as many tabs open as some (56 right now, and I'm surprised it's that many), or I'm just less interested in knowing their hierarchical structure. Pretty much all I want to do with tabs is to go to them, and I find I almost always remember enough of the title to find them. Interestingly, "%" only offers tabs from the same container you're in right now -- I can't decide if that's a handy feature or not.
As far as other keyboard shortcuts, I would probably use TST more if it offered "search and goto tab" within the TST window itself, including tab-key to fold/unfold sub-tabs, and return to select the actual tab.
I wonder if I've been trained by Emacs not to need to visualize these things. When I was first using it, I definitely felt a little uneasy without a visual "overview".
It helps that at this point I have a lot of subconscious habits about how I arrange tabs automatically. For instance, when browsing something like HN from the front page, if a link interests me I'll middle-click the comments link first, opening it in a sub-tab. If I'm interested in the article as well, then from the comments sub-tab I'll middle-click the article link, generating a sub-sub-tab. I don't even think about this; it's just how I've browsed sites like HN for a long time at this point. I end up with a nice little structured recreation of whatever part of the homepage I'm interested in at that moment. Then, if I don't want to worry about HN right now, I just collapse the entire tree and come back to it when I want a break.