Change VS tab behaviour?

'lo

Tabs in VS are great and all... but I would like a "hybrid" behaviour similar to Dreamweaver MX 2004 where you can convert the UI to MDI at will.

Or even better: like Dreamweaver MX and DW4 where it was "Mac-style" SDI (toolbars and stuff in the "main" window, each open document has its own SDI window) you could do this with VisualBasic 6 btw

I'd also like to see the text of the tabs be contracted better, it would be easier if it just showed the filename, not the path, (especilly when you've got just 3 files open, but because they're spread around the project directory the tabs can reach up to 400px wide!

Better and more visible "divider" lines and a "hover effect" (such as underlining) would be cool.

Unless all of this is already implemented in VS2005?

i dont even like underlining in HTML links.

W3bbo wrote:

'lo

Tabs in VS are great and all... but I would like a "hybrid" behaviour similar to Dreamweaver MX 2004 where you can convert the UI to MDI at will.

Or even better: like Dreamweaver MX and DW4 where it was "Mac-style" SDI (toolbars and stuff in the "main" window, each open document has its own SDI window) you could do this with VisualBasic 6 btw

Are you talking about VB3 style SDI interface? In that case, please god no! I hated that interface. VB5 MDI was so much better, and tabs are better still.
And in VS2005, changing from tabbed to MDI and back no longer requires a devenv restart, so you can change at will.

W3bbo wrote:

I'd also like to see the text of the tabs be contracted better, it would be easier if it just showed the filename, not the path, (especilly when you've got just 3 files open, but because they're spread around the project directory the tabs can reach up to 400px wide!

This is done in VS2005. Hovering over the tab gives the full path. There's also no more scrolling, instead only a limited number of tabs is shown (as much as fit on the screen), and the rest of them can be accessed using a drop down list.

W3bbo wrote:

Better and more visible "divider" lines and a "hover effect" (such as underlining) would be cool.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The slanted appearance of the tabs in VS2005 makes them quite easy to distinguish.

Have to agree about the tab titling. When you're got a bunch of namespaces in your project it makes the tabs bigger and then you have to scroll about to get to them which is really annoying, or just have less files open. It would be nice if you could configure the tab bar to use multiple rows kinda like you can with the Windows taskbar.

Alternatives would be to get rid of the tabs altogether and have a tool window (or a split section on the project explorer) that lists all the open files. They could also embolden the names of open files in the project explorer and users could just use that to switch between files for users that are really short of screen space.

Not so sure about the traditional MDI stuff which I think is completely redundant now (I mean nobody wants overlapping child windows and if you want to divide the workspace you can use multiple tab groups already). As for the SDI interface, I don't like that but I know some people might. It's probably not overly difficult to implement given how componentised VS is.

(I can't say anything about VS2005 cos my beta2 dvd still hasn't turned up despite getting an email telling me it shipped over a week ago!)

rhm wrote:

Alternatives would be to get rid of the tabs altogether and have a tool window (or a split section on the project explorer) that lists all the open files.

Like the "Picture List" in Photodraw?

W3bbo wrote:

Like the "Picture List" in Photodraw?

Never used Photodraw. I'm thinking of a shareware editor called Textpad that just used a listbox to show all the open files. Simple for users and easy to program even if it doesn't look very flash.

Hey All - I'm a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Core team. We own the file tab channel, and I'd be happy to take any feedback you might have on what we've implemented in VS 2005 Beta 2. Let me know if you have any questions or feature requests for future versions.

Cheers,
Aaron Brethorst
(abreth@SPAMISBAD.com, where SPAMISBAD -> microsoft)