Tabs

[Daniel Jensen]

I wasn't a subscriber here but was reading the recent argument about 
tabs in Thunar in the list archive and wanted to mention an alternative: 
tab support at the WM level. It has some disadvantages arising from not 
being tailored for the application, but a lot of folks out there feel 
that this kind of task really belongs to the WM and that solving the 
problem over and over again in each application is kind of an ugly hack. 
Solving the problem at the WM level does also address a lot of the 
"simplicity" concerns that were raised.

KDE added tab support to KWin for version 4.4; a few of the other WMs 
that support tabs are mentioned at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_%28GUI%29#Window_managers_that_provide_a_tabbed_document_interface 
.

I know KDE was looking at ways to make the grouping happen automatically 
and creating an api to give the application control over grouping; I 
don't know how those efforts are going now. Seems like something that 
people should try to come up with a standard api for-is this a job for 
freedesktop.org?

Really the best excuse browsers etc have for doing tabs themselves is 
that it's hard to get the proper changes in window management behavior 
from the MS and Apple- controlled UIs. Even on those platforms people 
have made third-party solutions (see comments and links at 
http://code.google.com/p/mintty/issues/detail?id=8 ).