[TxMt] Re: RC29-30-31 don't obey tab auto-close override

[Andrew Hodgkinson]

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.

-- 
TTFN, Andrew Hodgkinson
Find photos, software, music and more at my home site, Bandcamp and 
GitHub:
https://pond.org.uk / https://pondnz.bandcamp.com / 
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