[Qt-creator] tab area for open files

[Henry Skoglund]

Hi, just want to add, there's another "lean and mean" aspect of not 
having tab bars in Qt Creator: screen real estate. No tabs = 2 extra 
source lines visible. Instead, you can split vertical and/or horizontal, 
for example on a 16:9 screen you can have the .h file in a left window 
and the .cpp file visible in a right window.

If you're working in Xcode, at least you have a choice of using or not 
using tabs, but in Visual Studio 2010 and in all VS versions after that 
they're mandantory :-( All my old VS projects I preferably edit in 
Visual Studio 2008 which uses approx. the same tiled windows system as 
Qt Creator.

Rgrds Henry


On 2015-03-21 19:49, Hunger Tobias wrote:
>
> Hi Freddy,
>
> As far as I know there is no tab bar available for Qt Creator -- definitely not inside the official repos, but I am also not aware of any 3rd party plugins that add those.
>
> In our opinion tabs are a great way to switch between a handful of things (lets say less than 20 or so). In an IDE we could use that to switch between files, but any "real" project will have thousands of files and you will routinely have more than a handful of those open at any time. So our stance is that tabs make no sense in the use-cases we have in Qt Creator and we are *very* reluctant to add code we do not think useful. AFAIR we rejected some tab bar plugin for that reason. We try hard to keep Creator lean and mean, so we are really reluctant to add code we do not consider to be useful.
>
> We do over a long list of navigation options -- and I think in combination they address all the use-cases I have seen brought forward for tabs (in addition to many others):
>
> The most powerful is the locator: Hit Ctrl-K and start typing a part of a file name to open any file in your open projects. Type "c ClassName" (after Ctrl-K) to open the header that defines the class ClassName. Type "m someMethod" to go to any place where someMethod is defined, etc. The locator is a really powerful way to hop around your project. IMHO anybody not hitting Ctrl-K a lot when using Qt Creator is doing something wrong:-)
>
> Then you can use F2 to follow a symbol (which can act as a convenient way to switch between declaration and definition by the way). You can also use F4 to switch between a .cpp file and its header. That takes away much of the pain of many people requesting tabs: Those are used to navigate between a small set of files and quite often between a .cpp file and its header file.
>
> There is also navigation history: Alt-Left/Alt-Right. It is basically the "back" button of Qt Creator. It takes you through the history of places you did editing. That also works inside one document.
>
> There is Ctrl-Tab to quickly switch between recently used documents. That pops up a small window with the open documents sorted by use. That is pretty close to what a lot of people use tabs for.
>
> Then there is the sidebar which can show the open documents. That is nice for more visual people and the closest you can get to a tab bar in Qt Creator that I am aware of.
>
>
> Did we miss some aspect of the problem? What is your reason to ask for tabs?
>
> Best Regards,
> Tobias
>
> Tobias Hunger, Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt
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