Retractable Tab Bar

[siniscarr]

An issue I often find myself running into on any given day is the curse of procrastination. Be it watching YouTube, reading tech news, or simply indulging in comic books and superheroes, I'll find myself unconsciously seeking distractions from my otherwise important duties. This is an issue I'm sure many people can relate to, and it's one that I aim to at least slightly remedy with this concept.

Something that's always contributed to my procrastination habits is having a large quantity of tabs open, or simply forgetting to close tabs with the idea that I'll get back to them later and don't want to lose where I was. Having all those tabs open can easily distract from workflow and make focusing in on things just that much more difficult. What I propose to fix this is a Retractable Tab Bar. Vivaldi currently supports two options for your Tab Bar: hidden or shown. The Retractable Tab Bar is sort of a pleasant in-between of these two options for those who sometimes need to just drown out their distractions, or just find themselves wanting to swap the look of their browser sometimes.

To help explain this concept a bit more fluently as well as to show a proof of concept, I whipped up a visual guide.

Man, I've gotta finish this paper but I have so many other things I want to do!

Let's see if there's something in the settings that can help me...

Retractable Tab Bar sounds interesting... I'll try it out.

A new button? Let's see what it does!

Whoa! It hid all my tabs without completely getting rid of my Tab Bar! Now I can switch around between pages and focus more easily!

[LonM]

I'm not quite sure how this differs from the tab bar simply being off. I can see three differences:

• There is a button to toggle the presence of the tab bar (which is covered by this FR
• There is still a visible + button, but to me that seems kind of useless if you have the tab bar disabled.
• You can see tab stacks - but wouldn't that be a distraction all the same?

[siniscarr]

@LonM I appreciate the feedback!

• There is a button to toggle the presence of the tab bar (which is covered by this FR

I actually hadn't seen this somehow despite searching around a bit for a similar suggestion before making this post, so good call on that one.

• There is still a visible + button, but to me that seems kind of useless if you have the tab bar disabled.
• You can see tab stacks - but wouldn't that be a distraction all the same?

Thinking about it, the + button being visible doesn't really make a lot of sense while it's retracted, and having the tab stack by visible doesn't make a lot of sense either. Guess that's the sort of thing I'd overlook when drafting something at ~4:30 in the morning haha!

The difference I was aiming for was mostly just something to circumvent having to open settings, re-toggle the tab bar, and then resume browsing every time somebody would want to do just that. Maybe it's just a me problem.

Given the removal of the visible tab stack and + button, I do still think that this is a much more specific feature rather than something much more broad and spanning as opposed to the post you had linked above. Might just put my money on the other suggestion since it covers a lot more features than just one little detail.

[LonM]

@siniscarr You can also assign it a shortcut in settings (e.g. Alt+T), or access it via quick commands - F2, then type tab.

[Komposten]

As @LonM said, you can easily toggle the tab bar with a keyboard shortcut or by writing "tab bar" in Quick Commands (default: F2).

If you want to switch tabs while the tab bar is hidden you can still use Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab, or type part of the name of a tab in Quick Commands and navigate to it that way. If you enable the Tab Cycler, pressing Ctrl+Tab will popup a list of all open tabs so that you can still see them if you want.

Edit: If you want an even more distraction free workspace you can toggle off the UI (Ctrl+F11) or just go full screen (F11). You can still switch tabs like above, and you can access the address bar using Ctrl+L or F8.

[madiso]

Why not pull the relevant tabs to a separate window? That would prevent you from accidentally procrastinating when (blindly) switching tabs :face_with_stuck-out_tongue:

[LonM]

Thank you for your request. As this post has had less than 5 votes over 4 years it will now be archived.