Tab Interface

Roger

Greetings,

A common problem my students and I have been having is with the item tabs. One option I'd love to see is being able to 'scroll' through the items in the Overview window and having them appear tab area. Right now you need to click on each item to see it and it opens a bunch of tabs, which quickly become too numerous and push the window to the right.

Perhaps you could always have a "Overview" button to the left of the tabs. When this button is selected/active, whatever item is highlighted in the overview panel (either through clicking or scrolling), then appears as a special "tab" window.

Relatedly, it would also be very helpful if when open a lot of tabs, instead of pushing the window to the right, the tabs automatically stacked as multiple rows, instead of a really long single row.

sebastiaan

Thanks for the feedback!

Perhaps you could always have a "Overview" button to the left of the tabs. When this button is selected/active, whatever item is highlighted in the overview panel (either through clicking or scrolling), then appears as a special "tab" window.

Hmm, I really like the general idea, but I'm not sure about the specifics. Here's a small variation on the same theme:

• Scrolling in the overview area has the same effects as successively clicking on the various items (ie., opening lots of tabs)

• In addition, there's a "single tab" option (perhaps indeed in the form of a toggle-able button or checkbox to the left of the tabs). If enabled, opening a new tab will have the effect of replacing the current tab, thus preventing "tab-accumulation".

What do you think?

Relatedly, it would also be very helpful if when open a lot of tabs, instead of pushing the window to the right, the tabs automatically stacked as multiple rows, instead of a really long single row.

Yes, I agree that this would be better. But it may be tricky, since the tab-widget is a built-in part of the graphical toolkit (Qt4, QTabWidget). So this minor change might be more complicated than at first sight it would seem, in which case I will probably not get around to it in the very near future.

Roger

I like the idea of the the toggle-able button "single tab" option. Can't wait to start beta-testing it. :-)

sebastiaan

Right now we're finalizing 0.25, but for 0.26 I'll definitely include it (or something along those lines). Btw, if you'd like to do beta-testing, it might be worthwhile to install a Python environment. This way you can always download and test the latest code snapshot from GitHub, rather than having to wait for pre-release packages (which I typically create only as the actual release draws near).

Setting up a proper Python environment is not as easy on Mac OS as it is on Linux and Windows, but there's a tutorial here: http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/getting-started/running-from-source#macos

Roger

I've got a grant proposal and conference paper due soon so I'll look into setting up the Python environment in a couple of weeks.

Cheers,
Roger