Replace Tab Tiling with Docking
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Hi,
I find tiling of tabs to be a half-implemented feature. Together with stacks, workspaces, and then sessions, it makes for a mixed hierarchy but I think tiling of tabs is the least intuitive, because of how opening links is handled. You can't open a link in a tab within the tiled pair. It appears outside the tiled tabs. What if I want to read the new tab next to the original tile? There's no indication on the tabs of which ones are tiled, and they're not necessarily next to each other either.
The solution to this isn't to add more clunky options to tiling. Overall, the development of these things has fallen into the trap of bolting ideas onto what's there, but the end result isn't really coherent, or complete.
My proposal: Bin tab tiling and replace it with simple docking of tabs like in Visual Studio and similar applications.
- Want a tab tiled with another? Just drag and dock it next to it.
- Allow panes ("tiles") to hold multiple tabs.
- Want another tab in the same pane? Great! Just dock it into that pane.
- Want a tab in an additional pane? Great! Just drag it off to create a new pane. Show the user a preview of what will happen to their window, like Visual Studio.
- Open another tab by any means? It goes in the current docking pane unless you ask otherwise or move it later.
- Want tab stacks as well? Great! They're just a container for other tabs that may or may not be docked in whatever layout the user wants.
Please for the love of anything holy abandon tab tiling in favour of something that is actually flexible
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@WhereverPenguin Have you tried Stacking the Tiled Tabs?
In Settings, Tabs, Tab Stack Options:
Open Tab in Current Tab Stack -
Hi,
I have tried that. Every opened tab within the stack adds another tile, so you have 3 pages next to each other, then 4. It's not close to what I'm proposing.Now, I could extend what I'm suggesting so that when you tile tabs they are automatically put in a "stack" so the stack acts as their container. The ability to split the window then becomes something inherent to a stack.
You could put tabs in a stack as you do now and dedicate the entire window to each one, swapping between them. Or, you could reorganise the tiles as described in my original post to different panes/tiles. Each tile has its own set of tabs within the stack.
See Visual Studio for an example how flexible this docking approach to tab placement and window splitting can be.