qpdfview

Feature request: option for vertically stacked tabs with horizontal labels

Asked by Adrianna Pińska

I use qpdfview to open many PDFs with very long names at once. I specifically wanted to use a tabbed viewer to do this so that I don't have to search through a large number of individual open windows.

My previous solution was to group all (untabbed) PDF viewer windows together in a tabbed window at the window manager level (Fluxbox has this functionality), but this does not allow me to maintain multiple windows with different selections of related tabs.

I was hoping that qpdfview would help me to solve this problem (and I see that the most recent development version has made it easier to move files between windows, which is great). However, at the moment the tabs are almost completely useless for navigation because the names are all abbreviated to near-illegibility.

I would prefer to have the tabs stacked vertically, the way e.g. Tree Style Tab stacks tabs in Firefox (disregarding the "tree" part). I can change the position of the tabs in qpdfview, but when the tabs are positioned on the left or right, the labels are rotated so that the text is vertical.

I was hoping that I could override this behaviour using a stylesheet, but it doesn't look like this is possible.

Is there any possibility of adding an alternative tab widget, with horizontal labels and a configurable width?

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Adam Reichold (adamreichold) said : 		#1

Hello Adrianna,

thank you for your suggestion, but I don't reimplementing an alternative tab widget is a good decision for the project since it lacks developer time as it is and adding more code to maintain won't help with that. Concerning your particular use case: If you really have a lot of tabs within a single window, then dedicating large amounts of screen space to the tab headers might be quite wasteful and will only get you so far until even vertical tabs with horizontal text will be become useless. I would rather suggest that you try to use the tabs menu in these situations: It can be made scrollable (instead of becoming several menus next to each other) and searchable (meaning search-as-you-type whenever the menu is active) via the settings dialog and a program restart.

Best regards, Adam.

P.S.: If you really have many tabs and many windows, I suggest we extend the D-Bus interface to allow enumeration of tabs and write a Python script that gives a fullscreen searchable view of all open tabs in all open instances for quick navigation. Of course this is also quite some effort, even if it does not really increase the maintenance burden for qpdfview itself that much...

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