window tabbing (especially kdevelop)

[Max Lemieux]

I completely agree with Kevin's comment about the suckiness of
tablines swapping places. This occurred to me some hours after my
post, and I figured someone would point it out :) . Luke's suggestions
are good - simply don't swap tabline positions, or implement a new and
useful magnification feature. Since this is KDE, there could of course
be an option to choose which method you prefer :)

-Max

> >
> > I read somewhere that multiline tabs are considered one of the worst GUIs
> > ever usability wise, because they tend to change ordering of tab lines when
> > a tab of a line from behind gets activated, thus making it impossible to
> > quickly switch back to the previous one because you have to go and look for
> > it first.
> 
> Can't that easily be solved by simply not reordering the tab lines? I don't
> see a problem with the selected tab being somewhere other than at the bottom,
> but maybe that's just me...
> 
> Anyway, this would probably need a whole new API and such, but how about
> making overflowed tabzones scale horizontally to fit the full tabbar in the
> available space. Then, scale horizontal mouse movement when it is over the
> tabbar (so an overflowed tabbar would result in the mouse moving slower
> across) and magnify the part the mouse is over, somewhat like OSX's
> application bar or such.
> --
> Luke-Jr
> Developer, Utopios
> http://utopios.org/