Adding/Editing Node tab links through preprocess method

Question

When editing/adding/removing tab links to a Node page (View/Edit) is there a quick way doing this with a hook_preprocess method and not via creating a module to alter them? Such as using hook_process_page() and then editing the $title_prefix array since this is where they are stored.

Example: I created a module for editing the contextual links, but what if I wanted to skip creating a module and directly inject my changes in the template.php via hook().

function mymodule_contextual_links_view_alter(&$element, &$items) {
      $element['#links']['new-links'] = array(
        'title' => 'Add something new',
        'href' => url('/admin/config/add/something/new', array('absolute' => TRUE)),
      );
    }

Answer 1

All _alter() hooks can be implemented by themes as well as modules, so in that specific case you can just use

function mytheme_contextual_links_view_alter(&$element, &$items) {
  ...