KTabBar/QTabBar and documentMode

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

I've been looking into ways to configure (improve) the look and feel using the native platform theme on OS X, and was reminded quite quickly about one of the nuisances that can arise with the default look of the native widget used by QTabBar. It's easy to reach the number of open tabs where the underlying system starts truncating text, replacing it with an ellipsis. Adding a close button doesn't help of course; this affected the tabbed document editor from KDevelop4, for instance.

What I had not realised was that QTabBar provides a documentMode exactly for this reason/application, which switches the widget to a mode more appropriate for multi-tab document views, on OS X. I see that Kate4 used to set that mode (makes you wonder why KDevelop4 didn't benefit from that), but the mode switch has disappeared from the current Kate code.
The only mention of the mode I've seen to date in KF5 frameworks code is in a comment (!) in kdelibs4support (src/kdeui/k4style.cpp).

I'm a bit early in asking this in that I haven't yet been able to test neither Kate nor KDevelop, but is there an "official" or consensual opinion about this (e.g. applications should call QTabBar::setDocumentMode themselves when appropriate ... and can be patched if they don't)?

R.