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Will Tabbed Windows Be the Next Big Thing?
kai_hiwatari writes "The recently released KDE SC 4.4 Beta 1 has introduced tabbed windows as a new feature. It is now possible to tab together windows from different applications. This looks like it will be a very good productivity tool. Like the tabbed browsers, this may well end up as a feature in all desktop environments in the years ahead."
When I clicked on this story, I knew there would countless comments saying, "We've already got this, it's called the taskbar" or words to that effect.
It's not the same thing. With windows containing tabs for multiple applications and/or documents, you don't have one taskbar; you have as many "taskbars" as you have windows open. This isn't necessarily something you'd want to do all the time, but I can certainly see how it would be useful in some situations. If I'm working on multiple code files, and for each of those files I have two or three browser windows open containing references for the specific file (a common enough occurrence in my field, which is bioinformatics; it's considered good form to put references to the appropriate journal articles in the code comments) then it would be very nice to be able to group the code and the browser windows in this way -- i.e., instead of a few code tabs in one window and a bunch of reference tabs in another window, for each chunk of code there would be associated references. If I could save those multi-tabbed windows and open them back up the same way the next time I got back to work on the project, so much the better.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It's rather disappointing that even now there are still people who think that "bars" crammed full of "tabs" with truncated text are somehow a game-changing paradigm shift compared to "bars" crammed full of "buttons" with truncated text.
More of the same, please!
Something I've always liked about the "old" X windows model that I dislike about Windows (and I think Mac as well), is the assumption that the application with the focus should be the one that is in front of all others. There are a lot of times when I'd like to type into one app, say a text editor, while viewing something else, like a browser loaded with a documentation page, where I want to see the whole browser while I type, even if that means just seeing a few lines of what I'm typing.
I know that GNOME allows a focus-follows-mouse mode, but it is partly incomplete as clicking in the window with the focus brings that window to the front. If anyone knows how to disable that, I'd appreciate it.
Mac windows are DOCUMENT centric; multiple windows represent multiple documents - this is why it did not matter in the early years that only 1 application could run at a time (except Desk Accessories.) This is also why the menu bar is disconnected; remains at the top, and indicates the frontmost application - the MENUBAR is application centric. The document paradigm comes from Xerox.
Windows is application centric. So the menus go inside the application window and there is trend to give the application the whole screen space because its trapped (perspectivly) inside the window. This results in multiple documents being document centric windows inside an application window; which is confusing initially. OR they run multiple instances of the same application (appearance wise) to make it more document centric in behavior to avoid the nested window confusion. IE is an example of this; with the new IE tabs providing a document level "task bar" for switching IE documents within 1 application window as well as avoid the task bar clutter caused by lacking document centric windows.... A bunch of patches to what initially was a mistake; proven by the need to change so much of it.
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Long ago, tiling window managers were more popular than they are today. They allow you to split the screen into a bunch of non-overlapping regions and then place windows within each region, usually using some sort of tab or menu selection mechanism.
You can still get these today in the form of Ion and RatPoison and similar window managers. Unfortunately, window managers like Ion have a horrendously bad user interface, using myriads of keyboard commands and providing little in the way of visual guidance.
It would be really nice if some of the major desktop environments actually provided a user-friendly tiling window manager. This would mean using standard "split window" components for splitting the screen, and indicating available windows within each tile using tabs. Tabs could be dragged and dropped between tiles.
I think this would actually help a lot of beginners, since overlapping windows still confuse many users.