One of the most popular feature requests (more than 20,000 votes) for Windows 10 is tabs in File Explorer. Microsoft has resisted adding tabs to File Explorer and apps in general for years, after originally introducing tabs in Internet Explorer 6 with a toolbar extension back in 2005. That resistance is about to change, in a big way. Microsoft is planning to add tabs to apps in Windows 10, allowing you to group together apps in a better way.
Windows 10 testers will first start testing what Microsoft calls ^aEURoeSets^aEUR in the coming weeks, and the tab integration will be initially limited to Windows 10’s special Universal Windows Apps. Microsoft is planning to get as much feedback on the new feature as possible, before tweaking it and making it available to everyone. The software giant isn’t committing to a specific timeline for tabs.
This is an incredibly neat idea, and I can’t wait to try and see if this feature makes any sense in my workflow.
It is very useful. I miss it quite a bit ever since I moved from Fluxbox to Openbox. http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/features/tabs.php Super useful.
I miss the yellow title tabs in BeOS windows, too.
They can be dragged & arranged freely.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/12/a-wayback-machine-journey-wi…
Still waiting for HaikuOS R1 to come.
Only up to R5.03. Anything based on the leaked R5.x “Dano” (and this includes the PowerPC version) does not have this feature.
Does Haiku have it?
> Still waiting for HaikuOS R1 to come.
Why wait? Haiku is getting better every day. Try a nightly.
Lots of progress lately. Seems like they tackled a ton of issues in the recent coding sprint.
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/pulkomandy/2017-11-25_haiku_monthly_ac…
Changing the metaphor from “windows” to “tabs” would be a nice idea.
Actually I like the way windows can be docked, undocked and turned into tabs in Visual Studio. Having something similar at OS level would be amazingly nice and useful.
What, no mention of BeOS, Thom?
microsoft tabs….
but how ya going to read one document while writing notes/code in another document…
see some screen shots of this, makes me glad I’m not a windows user!!
MDI revamped
Heh, I was thinking “OLE makes a comeback”, since it looks like different applications sharing the same window.
That you have the possibility to display multiple documents in one window through tabs doesn’t mean you have to.
I would bet quite a lot on the fact that you will still be able to use side by side documents in the same way you can do it today
Maybe you should try out Windows once.
Didn’t test it myself, but if you want to play around with the concept, I think Stardock offers a similar tool:
https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/
(As far as I know in beta at the moment.)
The thing is, the described usage pretty much exactly matches how most people I know use multiple workspaces (what Microsoft calls ‘Virtual Desktops’), namely, using a workspace to store all the windows related to a particular task (although, I also know quite a few people like myself who just use one window per workspace and maximize everything).
On the other hand, I know of very few people who do this type of thing with tabs on a regular basis in the applications that do support them (real terminal emulators (not the Windows console host crap) being an example other than a web browser). They generally just avoid creating new windows at all, and open everything in a new tab (which, indirectly, is essentially equivalent to how I personally use workspaces, one window per workspace, all maximized).
This would be useful for Windows phones, and in theory would have been neat on the older Windows 8 tablets that provide no desktop at all, but I think that the use case could be far better served on the desktop by MS fixing the horrible usability issues with their ‘virtual desktop’ implementation (you need to chord 3-4 keys for everything to do with it, and as with everything in Windows, can’t reassign the hotkeys how you like), as that would bring them more in line with what people from other platforms expect.
Still waiting for the OS/2 Work Folder to come back, but this seems… interesting.
Under OS/2, you could drag a number of ‘objects’ (since Workplace Shell was truly object-oriented) ranging from program shortcuts to documents to web links into a single folder, mark it a “Work Folder”, and then when you opened that folder, all the items resumed their previous state. When you closed the folder, all the items saved their state, and closed.
Being able to open my “Netware dev” folder meant I got the C/C++ IDE, the API reference, a test window, all open, with the right files loaded, exactly where I left off the previous session.
Was a really cool feature, and I haven’t seen anything close since. The “sets” seem similar in nature, but since MDI is (apparently) too complicated for the average user, we get a collection of tabs, instead of a collection of windows.
Now, if you can group some sets together….
Very similar to the window tabbing/grouping of pre-plasma kde.