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First let me highlight a couple of good points about the new Tab design * the tabs are now in the top half of the screen, where studies have shown the mouse pointer spends most of its time (because people use menus) * the tabs can be re-arranged into an order of my choice. * the tab menu is alphabetically sorted There are some serious problems with the current design, which make it less usable than the old multi-line tabs at the bottom of the window: * with the old design I could see the names of all of the files I had open. The more files you had the more difficult it was, but if you were willing to look, you could see what was open. With the new design most of the files you have open have scrolled off the left or right of the row, so you have to go and open the menu and scan down it to see if the file is open. Indeed I find myself first visually scanning through the open tabs, then clicking to check the nearby tabs, then giving up and going to the menu, wasting even more time. * with the old design, as you opened and closed several windows, what tended to happen is the files you kept open migrated to the top left corner. The first row of tabs would become stable, and as you worked with a set of files for hours or days you would learn the positions of the tabs, leading to fast access. With the new design what's happens is the files you keep longest open are always scrolled out of sight on the left. Each time you open a new file it is added to the far right of the open tabs, so you end up with the files you've had open the longest at the left end, and the files you've just opened at the right end. This results in a lot of scrolling around through the tab control. * I can drag the tabs to re-order them, which is useful, but its usefulness is severly limited because the groups I could spend time carefully arranging will be scrolled out of view as soon as I open a new file Perhaps what is needed is two areas: an area for files just opened and a "stable, pinned" area that can hold 8-10 tabs? Perhaps the tab control could be two rows tall to accomodate this? If I figure I'll be working with a file for a while, I'll drag it into the stable area. Now it will not move around as I open and close files. * As the tab bar is at the top of the screen, it can really only show 8-10 tabs @ 1280x1024 (which is reasonably high) Did you consider putting the tab bar down the left or the right side of the editor window? Surely if it were there I'd be able to see 20, 30 or even 40 tabs open at one time, in a single column? The width of the column would be adjustable, and tooltips could be used to show filenames that are just too wide for the column. Sorry if this is too much for one bug. I considered entering every buller individually, but I feel like each point builds on the previous one, and they need to be read together in the first instance. Thanks for your time.
Passing to Dusan and Jano for evaluation, IMO this is more enhancement suggestions then defect, but anyway.
ping ;-) it's one of the issues found also in Russian-speaking community to be the most annoying. Of course, having -J-Dnetbeans.winsys.oldtabs=true helps, but it's more of a hack, not an easily tweakable, and not advertised much ;-)
I agree with the most points brought up in this issue by lordpixel. The thing is that this wasn't a priority in past releases. We will try to plan for it for release after 5.0. I can see 2 solutions: - bring the regular (multi-row) tabs back as an option in the options dialog - this should be fairly easy - design completely new tab behavior taking into account lordpixel's comments - this would require much more effort. Anyway this is not a defect. Chaning to enhancement.
Re-reading what I wrote a year and a half ago, I still feel most of the points are reasonable. Over that time, through Netbeans 4 and 5 I have changed by habits from what I used to do in 3.X. I no longer tend to hunt around scrolling in the tab control for a particular tab. I pretty much go straight to the dropdown tab menu to find tabs. This means in a sense, we're back to the bad old days of the "Window" menu having all of the open files in it as in something like Visual Cafe. I think I've subconciously more or less given up on the tab control, because it's never regained the access speed advantage it has in 3.X. I actually think being able to move the tabs to the left or right side of the window is probably the best balance of simplicity and ease of use. Part of the reasoning for this is many people still wrap their code at 80 or 100 chars, and 99% of computer screens are wider than they are tall. This means horizontal space is at less of a premium that vertical. This it's quite likely that a user can afford the space down the side of the editor window (assuming they've minimized the Navigator, Project, Runtime and Files views) I'm not claiming there's a simple answer here. Providing usability when developers have 10, 20 or 30 files open is hard - but if it can be solved it'd be very worthwhile.
Editor tabs in 7.4 are very customizable to address your issues.