[MonoDevelop] Stripped down GTK# notebook tabs for monodevelop

[Michael Hutchinson]

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 2:33 PM, Anirudh <anirudh at anirudhsanjeev.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I wasn't liking the default tab display of MonoDevelop. It used up too much
> space, combined with C#'s usual long filenames, I'd see only two or three
> tabs at a go. I tried hacking a more frugal tab label system, and was sort
> of successful.
>
> I changed MonoDevelop.Components.TabLabel and
> Monodevelop.ide.gui.sdiworkspacewindow and made the following changes:
>
> 1. Removed icon and the close button - Ctrl+W and middle click works fine
> for me.
> 2. Stripped text to 7 characters and added ellipsis.
>
> I've attached before and after screenshots. You can take a look and get a
> better idea of what I have in mind.
> The best option is to settle for a middle-ground and write a system which
> automatically shortens titles when there are more tabs opened. Firefox has a
> robust implementation of this, and it doesn't seem simple to implement.
>
> I wanted your opinions on my change, whether something like this would help
> improve MonoDevelop.

I think we definitely need something like this, since the notebook's
pretty unusable with large numbers of tabs right now. I tend to use
shift-tab, or alt-shift-open. However, the ellipsised names can get
awkward especially when they're really small.

The number of responses to this email show that people have many
different ideas of how it should be done :) IMO it would be useful to
see how other IDEs do it but also web browsers, since people are
familiar with how tabs work in web browsers.

I agree that the icons looks like a low-hanging fruit for elimination,
though they can be useful visual indicators, particularly the welcome
page, and also in ASP.NET projects.

A couple of other ideas I'd throw into the mix are:
a) Use a smaller font size, maybe the custom pad font that's already defined.
b) Instead of having arrows at either end for scrolling, have a
dropdown list like Firefox or VS.
c) Only display the close button when hovering over a tab, and paint
it on top of the text, so as not to jitter the layout.

I also really like the way that VS does it, which is to remove tabs
from the right when the bar overflows. The documents are then
accessible from the (b) dropdown list, and selecting then adds them
back on the left, so that the most recently used documents are always
visible. No shrinkage necessary.

The thing I'd really like to avoid is additional settings. I'm sure we
can find a mixture of ideas that works for most people.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com