[haiku-development] Re: [RFC] Getting rid of the tabs in Terminal, using Stack & Tile instead

  • From: Adrien Destugues <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2015 22:15:56 +0200

On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 09:32:19PM +0200, Ingo Weinhold wrote:

* No more accidentally closing a tab by middle clicking it when trying
to paste something in the terminal

I guess, you need to practice aiming. ;-) Given that Terminal closes the tab
without alert only when the shell is the foreground process, the damage in
such a case is usually limited, anyway.

I often trigger this by accident when trying to copy text from one tab
to another. This involves clicking on a tab, then middle clicking on the
work area below it to paste.

While the damage is limited, losing my current directory, setarch
status, scrollback (possibly with the output of a long compilation) and
any variables I had set in bash is quite annoying.

Since the operation is destructive, I think it would be a good idea to
protect it under cmd+click or something similar.


A more general concern I have is that switching from in-window tabs to
stacked windows has very little advantages in itself (saving a fairly small
amount of screen estate being the only one really), but it breaks a certain
work-flow: stacking windows which themselves have tabs. Admittedly I've
never used it with Terminal, but with web browser windows (for which the
idea of switching from a tab view to stacked windows has been proposed in
the past as well) I find it simply awesome. E.g. the six Firefox windows --
each with plenty of tabs -- which currently clutter two of my KDE desktops
(aka workspaces), I would very neatly organize on a single workspace on
Haiku.

The real problem is that BTabView is not designed for a generic tabbed
document interface. It is meant to be used for fixed set of tabs in
preferences windows or things like that. In WebPositive we use a
completely different implementation, with bigger tabs, an explicit close
buton, and a way to reach tabs that don't fit the view width. Maybe we
should extract this from Web+ and make it part of interface kit; but I
think the idea of using Stack&Tile is nice, and it is what most web
browsers are doing, in their own way, in other OSes. This means
Stack&Tile should first get all the required features: scrolling,
customizable icons and menus, etc.

--
Adrien.

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