HIG: tabwidgets

[Gábor Lehel]

On 3/9/06, Florian Graessle <holehan at gmx.de> wrote:
> Now that we are discussing tabs, there is one feature that comes to my
> mind I think we should discuss: the possibility to reopen closed tabs. I
> think it happens regularly that tabs - let it be web pages in konqueror,
> documents in kate or shell sessions in konsole - that are either closed
> by accident or closed and again needed later on. How about introducing a
> menu entry in e.g. the window menu that say "Closed
> (Tabs|Documents]Sessions|...) ->" or just "Closed ->" and then lists the
> tabs that were closed in this session? (Again I would like to point to
> the opera web browser, where this is already successfully implemented.)

In general, I think Opera's tab widget is (one of) the best out there.

Some more things to like, and perhaps copy:

- Close button on each tab, on the righthand side, with an icon on the
left. It makes sense to close the tabs from the tabs themselves,
instead of having to go looking around the application for a seperate
close button, and this also mirrors the layout of window decorations
(ok, so that can change, but it's the default everwhere except OS X).

- Drag & drop reordering of tabs. If you drag to outside of the tab
bar, though, it works just like normal drag & drop.

- You can click on the active tab to 'minimize' it*, like with a
taskbar -- this means it won't be the tab that gets activated after
the active one is closed. This can be pretty useful in practice (if
you have a document you want to keep around to look at later, but want
to deal with the rest of the open ones first, for example).

- When you open way lots of tabs. instead of excess ones scrolling off
the righthand side into oblivion, all of them shrink to fit (the text
is ellipsified, then hidden, but below a certain size the icon itself
is also scaled, and then hidden). This works usably up to around a
hundred tabs or so, beyond that it might be worth starting a second
row of tabs (which Opera doesn't do).

- When you open lots of tabs, the close buttons are hidden, except on
the active tab. This is a pretty nice solution to the "when you have
too many tabs, all the space is taken up by close buttons, so you
can't click on a tab without closing it", problem.

- Well thought out activation order. When you close the active tab, it
activates the tab that was most recently active (but never a minimized
tab), and after that, the oldest tab you opened in the background (so
you can open pages 1 - 2 - 3 of an article in the background, and
they'll be activated in that order, for example).

- Convenient to use with the mouse -- you can middle click a tab to
close it, double or middle click in the empty area to open a new one,
and such. Our current tab widget is already pretty good in this
respect (though I prefer middle clicking to only paste in text
widgets, but I suppose that's a matter of taste) -- it actually does
one better than Opera's, which doesn't let you scrollwheel to cycle.

- Thumbnails of tabs' contents in their tooltips -- though this'd only
work for certain kinds of applications (not, for example, with things
like konversation, konsole, or kate).


* This used to be available by default, but now you have to turn off
'show close buttons on tabs' in order to have it. I'm honestly not
sure why they made the two mutually exclusive.

--
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.