Limit on number of files opened in tabs

[Joachim Lous]

discuss-bounces at nedit.org wrote:
> - Name crunching (where common prefixes on adjacent tabs are elided,
>   eg /file.c\/file.h\ could appear as /file.c\/.h\ instead

This is where it gets interesting. 

<dreaming>
One way that I believe would work well (but too costly for
reality) would be to borrow a concept from the OS X taskbar
(well, actually from decade-old HCI research into "lens"
interfaces):

When the tab bar startts truncating names, and the mouse
passes over it, the tabs roughly under the cursor
scale up to reveal the whole name, and the ones nearby show a
bit more that the rest too. Like moving a reading lens over
the bar, but mostly affecting the horizontal axis.

For this to be useful, the scaling would have to be smoothly
and calmly animated, so you easily track the action visually.
Unreadable tabs that in adition jump around the screen
insantaneously would bne disastrous.

In a more modern toolkit than Motif, with arbitrary
font scaling and smoothing, you would also want to make the
intermediate-sized tabs more useful by scaling and codensing
the font in them on a continuous scale. Small letters may
be hard to read, but less so than _missing_ letters, and
even for the smallest ones the shape of the word would
still give you a clue about which one to point to and
immediately check.
</dreaming>

In the meantime I'd repeat my request for a simple vertical
list. To me that beats tabs bar already at around 7 documents.
There is a reason just about every app you see these
days has a right pane with some kind of list or tree.
It works.

-Joachim.