Will Tabbed Windows Be the Next Big Thing? 528
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."
Um, this is very last year. (Score:2, Interesting)
Gimmick (Score:2, Interesting)
That being said, I think in the end we're going to have tabbed windows because the future is more likely to be running in a light-weight web-browser interface to the Cloud on any device you can imagine, rather than a resource-heavy hardware-dependent Windows or OS-X environment. How long it will take to get there is the only question.
The improvement we need in this area (are you listening Firefox people) is a way to group tabs the way I can group layers in Photoshop so that I can deal with the whole group (collapse, expand, move) together.
Correct level (Score:4, Interesting)
Giving up modpoints for this: this is an awesome feature. Basically this will do what the Google Chrome browser does, except now at the correct level.Like managing window size and position, it seems to me the tabbing of windows should be done at the Window Manager level. Currently, each app tries to solve this separately. That is a waste of resources.
Oh, FFS ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
There are lots of tabbed WMs out there (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been using the Ion window manager [cs.tut.fi] for years. The principle behind it is keyboard-controlled tabbed and tiled windows. There's an entire wiki list [wikipedia.org] of similar tiling window managers, which are all also tabbed window managers. Ion will also let you create non-tilled windows that are still tabbed, so exactly what KDE is now doing.
WMs that can do this have been around forever, but it's nice that they're finally going more "mainstream". I'm still never going to use KDE or Gnome (way to heavyweight), but it's nice that they might be a more reasonable option in the future.
Tab bars versus taskbars? WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:Yes (Score:2, Interesting)
Furthermore, you can click a taskbar button, ctrl-right-click another taskbar button and select for example the menuitem that displays the windows side-by-side. Very handy, if you want to compare two documents, or if you want to display SDK info on the left and your code on the right, and so on. You can show multiple code windows on screen. Or a graph and a database table. Or dragging files from A to B. Or keeping half-an-eye on something while doing something else. GP would start to miss non-maximised windows pretty quickly, I'd wager.
Back on topic, I switched to Chrome (actually, to a clone, but whatever) a while ago and even though it is in many ways the best browser I've ever had, I wish I could turn off the tabs. Almost nothing works right. I see why it is practical to have buttons for other browser windows on the largely unused titlebar of a maximised window, okay. But the browser windows don't appear on the taskbar, nor in the alt-tab order. On the whole, it was a lot more user friendly when I didn't have tabs. Of course, Chrome's good points make me stay, but I still wish I could turn off tabs. Which means that at least for me, the KDE functionality wouldn't be particularly useful. And, judging by the screenshot, it shares at least one flaw with Chrome: you can't use the "deep" top-right corner to close just one window, without closing all of the windows in a tab-group. A feature which may not be useful to everyone shouldn't get in the way when you don't use it.
B.t.w., site is unreachable, coral cache still works: http://digitizor.com.nyud.net/2009/12/07/is-tabbed-windows-going-to-be-the-next-big-thing/
Re:You have no idea how GOOD this is (Score:1, Interesting)
Focus follows mouse (FFM) is really dumb (I used it for a year and a half, so don't tell me that I haven't used it enough). The really obvious problem with FFM is that you have a mouse pointer over the top of the very window that you're working in. So, you have some of what you're trying to work with obscured.
You also have some of what you're trying to work with obscured if you try to work in a window which is behind the frontmost one, which is possible with FFM. So you can't see what you're doing. You could alleviate this by having widows come forward when focussed, but this looks extraordinarily messy and distracting when you're moving your mouse around.
If you can work without being able to see what you're doing, why do you need a mouse, or a monitor at all. If you actually do need to see what you're interacting with, FFM is a world a failure.
Now on to the real topic. KDE should just sort out their window management. Since the advent of Exposé on Mac OS X, I've essentially stopped using tabbed browsing for all but the instance where I have a whole bunch of links from a main page, and want to look at the sequentially when I'm done. Every other situation where I used to find tabbed browsing beneficial has been replaced by Exposé. I cannot think of an instance where having a heterogenous collection of items in a single window would be of benefit. The only time that I see tabs being useful is when they are used to store a sequence of similar items.
The organisational characteristics of this idea are much better served by multiple desktops. Then you can keep related windows together, and you can flick between them using the taskbar on each of the desktops, or you can look at a few of the windows at the same time, copy work between them, whatever you need to do.
I simply don't see what the problem is that this idea makes any headway toward solving.
Not a new feature but new in a big DE, I think (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't think GNOME has done this, don't know about XFCE. Compiz can do it, plus at least some basic tiling I think. And obviously not on Win or Mac. So KDE it the most "mainstream" desktop to have tabbed windows so far. But it's far from a new invention. There has also been talk of tiling support for KWin, the KDE window manager, which would make it even more useful. Various window managers using tabbing / tiling exist, such as ion, dwm, wmii, Xmonad, etc. They're nice but I missed the integration of having a full DE (though you can get it if you try). Partiwm is a project to create a more DE-friendly tabbing window manager but AFAICS it's gone a bit off track since its creator invented xpra and concentrated on that instead...
Friends of mine have observed that tabbing in the WM makes a lot of sense. Tab together a load of single browser instances and you have a multi-process web browser. OK, so it's not quite Chrome in security features but it's a heck of a lot simpler. Tab a load of terminals together and get a slick multi-terminal app. Tab OpenOffice together with your web browser whilst you're writing a report and researching stuff online. Tab together emacs + console running LaTeX + PDF viewer and get an integrated development environment for scientific papers. Nice.
I'm exaggerating the simplicity slightly but the point is that things are far more flexible if commonly-needed features (how many apps use tabs these days) are provided by the platform where possible.
Re:Oh, FFS ... (Score:3, Interesting)
No, that's not what I'm talking about. (Since I'm on OS X, I don't know about kpager, so take this FWIW.) What I have right now is
Window 1: BBEdit tab 1, tab 2, tab 3 ... ...
Window 2: Seamonkey tab 1, tab 2,
Window 3: Safari tab 1, tab 2
What I'd like to have, or at least be able to have, is:
Window 1: BBEdit file 1, associated Seamonkey tab(s), associated Safari tab(s)
Window 2: BBEdit file 2, associated Seamonkey tab(s), associated Safari tab(s)
Window 3: BBEdit file 3, associated Seamonkey tab(s), associated Safari tab(s)
Note that I'm not saying I'd work this way all the time; most of the time, I'd probably keep tabs grouped with their own apps. But having the option to move tabs around from window to window, without regard to application, would be really useful sometimes.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Haiku OS tabbed windows prototype (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
Back in the old (3.x) days of Windows it was much more common to have actual windows. Then MDI came along and limited you to moving docs within the space of the parent window, so the only thing was to maximize the Window if you wanted to compare docs. Then toolbar and menu bloat came along so if your window wasn't maximized you couldn't see half the commands. So now I think it's probably more habit than anything else.
Also I disagree with you. I find Slashdot and most other pages (as well as any app with lots of text like a word processor or IDE) much easier to read in a full window. More text on screen means it's easier to visually scan back to something if needed. Plus the problem with sizing your web browser is every page is designed for a different size. Even if a page is well-designed and doesn't assume a fixed width, there is still a certain width that each page needs to be to be reasonably readable, and that varies. Constantly resizing and repositioning a window is infuriating. True when it's maximized there is wasted space but at least the page will be readable.
Besides, damnit, I paid for dual wide-screen monitors and I'm not afraid to use them!
Re:Simply put (Score:3, Interesting)
"I use 'spaces' on the mac or multiple desktops on linux (windows has nothing useful) for the same thing now."
Ditto the above. I can't see how tabbed windows will improve my computing experience one whit. If anything, it's just one new gimmick that I have to learn to use the computer. Dammit, I like things the way I have them now, don't go changing things around, yet again.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
Pretty much a big failure on OS X that their Maximize doesn't even always make a window full screen.
OS X doesn't have Maximize. It has Zoom. It's only had Zoom since version 1.0 in 1984.
Apple's never implemented Maximize, and they've never pretended, even for a second, that Zoom is the same thing as Maximize. So the failure is you, I'm afraid.
Re:Wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
dexpot is free (though not open source) and very customizable. It has a few idiosyncracies (e.g. can't drag a window by a title bar to a different desktop), but even with them, it's better than the many other solutions I've tried.
Mac: Its a design perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
tiling window managers (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Less Simply put (Score:2, Interesting)
I've never found it stable enough to install on anyone's pc. It's just too easy to stuff up the taskbar etc and too busy/confusing for people who aren't very computer literate.
What exactly do you mean here by not stable? KDE 4.3 is stable as could be on my system. KDE 3.5 was too, although the earlier KDE 4 releases obviously had there problems.
By using 'stable' I mean more a stable user experience than straight code. Sure. Things crash. That's part of using software. On occasion things just don't work right, but with KDE I found that it was too easy for users to accidentally remove things from the task bar for example. Even if I had things locked down as much as I could, a simple sweep of the touchpad could have really strange consequences. I had to remove it from 3 or 4 computers after the users wanted to try it out, but found it too hard to use without things going wrong. Sure, none of these people were highly computer literate at all, but KDE is supposed to be easy to use.
Apart from building giveaway computers for disadvantaged students, I currently have pc's running Linux in three rooming houses for international students. I just can't risk putting KDE onto them without writing a script to replace the home folder with a clean default config every boot. Instead, I just configure wonderful, boring old Gnome to look as much like XP as possible, lock everything down so the students can't screw it up and do updates over the network once a fortnight. Half the time I don't even think they realise it's not XP until their pirate copies of Photoshop won't install. By contrast, when my mates had KDE on their pc's I was out every week fixing the stupid things.
Re:So what? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/pwm.html [cs.tut.fi]
Re:Simply put (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Simply put (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you able to open/close an entire workspace in one go, while retaining the state and content?
Like most people, I often have multiple windows/applications opened while working on a single project and those are usually the same for that project. Start another project and I have to close all of them and open up a set of different applications and windows (possibly even the same applications but with different documents opened).
It'd be great if I didn't have to do all that every time I change the project I want to work on.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Back when I was mudding a lot, a WM that would auto-arrange three muds (in xterms), two to three command lines (in xterms) and Angband (in an xterm) would've been ideal.
These days I wouldn't want to tile though - especially if I'm programming.
The code needs as much screen space as possible. To the extent that frankly everything else can be hidden. If I'm using an IDE, then it has panes with useful information/abilities in them, that aid the programming, so they can stay, but they're still tiny relative to the code. That said, on something like my laptop, I don't need the code window to be 1920 pixels wide, so I can put other windows to the side. I do still want it 1200 pixels tall though (less the usual fluff of window borders, menu bars, scroll bars, etc - but I don't let those take up much screen real estate either).
Command lines, web browser, email clients.. all hidden in the background or on another monitor.
For non-programming uses, word processors work best for me at around half screen width. Web browsers do too - full screen and I'm looking left to right too often; I use a large screen fairly close, I have to explicitly look at different regions of the screen. However, something like Visio needs to be full screen - you can't draw diagrams in a small window.
So I still don't want to tile, I want different applications to have different window sizes.
Would tabbed applications work? On a netbook, where the small screen size effectively forces everything full-screen, probably. On a 1920x1200 screen, possibly. I could have my usual text editor and my word processor in one window, tabbed, my main and secondary command lines in another window, tabbed, my spreadsheets/drawing tools/presentation tools in another window (full screen), tabbed. I guess I'm saying I'd have to be able to group windows together by both the position and width on screen that I tend to use them.
Instinctively I'm against the idea, but I was also against tabbed web browsing until I tried it and now I'm completely hooked..