Comments on: Tab frenzy

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 02:18:59 +0000

Feel free to raise Metacity bugs, if it wouldn’t be a complete rewrite. Are you thinking of something like twm?

By: Jon Pritchard

Jon Pritchard — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:37:45 +0000

It’s hard to tell when some of these developers are joking… I hope it’s april fools. Tabs have their place but not in every application.

By: Peteris Krisjanis

Peteris Krisjanis — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:56:25 +0000

I think Nautilus having tabs as *additional* feature is nice thing. Btw, while everyone cracked a joke, Empathy tabs was very nicely done and even could work for me (but maybe not for others).

Anyway, tabs done right are good thing, as they minimize ways to swith between data (in single app).

One thing is hilarious though – that all this made lot of people nervous Propably tabs aren’t so loved, are they?

By: Christian Neumair » Blog Archive » If I were at GUADEC…

Christian Neumair » Blog Archive » If I were at GUADEC… — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:55:54 +0000

[...] Calumn is totally right that tab implementations at application level are an effect of the lack of platform MDI support [...]

By: troll

troll — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 16:27:18 +0000

The only valid use case ever including GNOME and tabs is being drunk in a bar and having tab open. The other sort of tabs from all GUI’s on this planet should be nuked from the orbit.

By: calum

calum — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:42:35 +0000

Yeah okay, I knew the calculator one was a wind-up, wasn’t sure about the Totem one But nonetheless, we are seeing more and more of our key apps switching to tabs, so the question is still a valid one…

By: Olivier Le Thanh

Olivier Le Thanh — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:22:44 +0000

Fluxbox is the only WM I know which has tabs. I agree with you that this is ridiculous to re-implement tabs in every application, it would probably be better to have it done by the WM but I like to have my tabs at document level, (ie have the menu bar, toolbar and status bar in common) and I fear that doing it a WM level would mean having multiple instance of the application which would be slower.
It would also require a lot of work to integrate it properly into application, like the choice Firefox give its user to open link in a new window or in a new tab (and the application would have to special case it if the WM support tabs or not)

By: Olivier Le Thanh

Olivier Le Thanh — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:21:01 +0000

By: Ty Rex

Ty Rex — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:48:58 +0000

We who like tabs (and even would want it to not be a joke, because it would actually be useful) agree with you. We would much prefer some kind of grouping in our Window Manager of Choice instead. It might even be something not-tabs (but please, not taskbar grouping! That’s like in Epiphany when you can’t get an overview and have to do two clicks to navigate). Tabs may even be the best paradigm we’ve got.

There’s some kind of plugin in Compiz, that adds tabs, but it’s an unusable joke. And since many of us have moved on from Metacity, maybe Compiz is the best place for this. Both would be best of course.

I think keeping it simple is the way to go, like the suggestion in answer #1. Though maybe I’d like the tabs at the bottom? I’m not sure. Also, applications that are natural candidates for tabs should be able to use this from within themselves if the user so wishes. I don’t want to have to manually collect all my Gedit or Firefox windows when I always want tabs…

By: Saviq

Saviq — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 11:34:23 +0000

Well compiz does tabbing quite fine