On 8 Sep 2019, at 9:00, Marc Wilson wrote:

Apple’s broken idea of what tabs are is completely unusable. Poorly implemented and hard to use, hard to distinguish between tabs, etc.

Well, it seems to me at least that:

• TextMate's implementation uses the same colours, fonts and outlines.
• TextMate's tabs are a bit thinner, which saves a bit of screen space but at the expense of making it easier to "miss" when dragging and dropping tabs to reorder.
• Tab height aside, TextMate and Apple tabs appear to be visually almost indistinguishable.
• TextMate and Apple tabs both support drag-to-reorder.
• Apple's dragging seems as responsive as TextMate's, but I've had a few bugs with TextMate's tabs where they don't drop where you expect, or the tab bar gains "gaps" where closed windows leave spaces behind.

There are few things that seem to differ.

• Double-click on a tab to open in a new window. I seem to trigger this accidentally when clicking on a window to bring it to the foreground way more often than triggering it intentionally.
• Dragging a tab away from the tab bar with Apple tabs "tears off" the tab into its own window, similar to TextMate double-click. In TextMate, dragging a tab turns it into a thing which inserts "context dependent things" (e.g. entire file contents, file path, a Ruby 'require' statement) when dropped. This happens usually for me from a failed drag-to-reorder and the same feature is already available by dragging in a file from the File Browser anyway.
• Equally sized tabs with text truncation. This is IIRC how Apple tabs used to work until a couple of OS X versions or so ago; now they do the compression and expansion thing, which seems more helpful in a web browser but perhaps less so in a text editor. I'm on the fence. I did have a look at the Apple API docs to see if the application could choose the display style, but more on that below.

So what am I missing that makes OS X native tabs so bad compared to TextMate's? Doing all this dev work bespoke is surely gallant, but feels like it might be effort that could instead be spent elsewhere.

All this said - the API docs for Apple's tabs are a complete joke, to the point of utterly embarrassing. There is literally no documentation at all, beyond auto-generated lists of properties and methods with no descriptions of any kind whatsoever. Even more of a horror story for usability and consistency is the failure to update the HIG with any information on window level tabs; https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/windows-and-views/tab-views/ is a different thing entirely. There have been no documentation updates for this at all, at least, that I can find. This all comes from a company that used to set almost the gold standard in API design and documentation.

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TTFN, Andrew Hodgkinson
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