Bug 58590

Description Thomas Whitmore 2004-04-14 22:09:08 EDT

Unreadable Tabs with med-large worksets

  re: Blindness and un-usability of editor tabs

When Eclipse has more than a few files open, 50% of the visual real estate is
wasted by 'J' and 'X' icons and the '...' periods.

This leaves about 7 characters of visual representation. If you happen to be
working with a couple of collaborations or modularly named functional areas,
your tab labels will represent all files from the same functional area with
indistinguishable labels.

The new chevron is slightly better in this situation than the previous UI,
since the chevron is more usable/ convenient than going to the 'windows'
dialog.


This work with multiple files is fairly much my daily usage, maybe I'm
engineering over fairly large spans but the intention is that Eclipse should be
a strong engineering tool. So for a high proportion of my daily work, the tabs
really do become quite non-functional.

'Blind' is the sense of first glancing and then examining them more closely,
looking across them, and just being completely unable to see the desired file;
or even determine whether it's shown on the list at all.


I see a Vertical Layout for tabs as being clearly the correct design option. 
Vertical tabs would not be a workaround, would not require extra 'chevron' etc 
lists, would not require severe name truncation, would not be subject to 
changing row order, would be scalable to 20+ files and beyond, etc etc.

For all of these reasons I'd like to see Vertical Tabs implemented to fix this 
area once and for all, not further tweaks and workarounds with the horizontal 
tabs.

Besides the fact the vertical layout avoid the need for truncation, dropdowns, 
chevrons etc etc etc, they're just more natural to read for a list. Note that 
shopping lists are written vertically by every human being on Earth. There's a 
reason for that.