from Hacker News

WindowTabs: Browser-style tabbed window management on the desktop

by Emendo on 1/29/21, 9:25 PM with 58 comments

  • by mauricef on 1/29/21, 10:38 PM

    Hah! A friend just shared this with me, I'm Maurice the original author, long time anonymous hn lurker. This was a labor of love, I still remember the sheer exhilaration when I made my first sale!

  • by donatj on 1/29/21, 10:30 PM

    I'm surprised no one has mentioned BeOS / Haiku who's windows titlebars Tab automatically across all programs.

    https://discuss.haiku-os.org/uploads/default/original/1X/abb...

  • by AnIdiotOnTheNet on 1/29/21, 9:28 PM

    Awesome. Microsoft themselves had planned this feature for some time, but abandoned it for some reason. Instead they were probably focusing their efforts on making it harder to prevent automatic updates.

  • by helloworld on 1/29/21, 10:07 PM

    In 1993, the Windows Taskbar actually began life as tabs across the top of the screen:

    https://www.businessinsider.com.au/history-of-the-windows-st...

  • by lostmsu on 1/29/21, 10:32 PM

    Self-ad: Stack WM (for Windows 10). Also shows tabs for windows, but works more like a tiling WM.

    https://losttech.software/stack-whatsnew-2.0.html

  • by pidg on 1/29/21, 10:24 PM

    Not free (or 'free') but there is a commercial app that does this very well indeed - Stardock Groupy. It was bundled in with something else I bought years ago and I just leave it running as it's quite handy.

    https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/

  • by esalman on 1/29/21, 10:29 PM

    My go-to file explorer power tool on Windows is Q-dir [1]. It supports tabbing among other useful features.

    [1] http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Freeware/Q-Dir

  • by maverick74 on 1/29/21, 11:24 PM

    KDE Plasma also had this many years ago (before Windows' Sets), but they ended up removing it in Plasma 5.

    (there is a bug report about it: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343690

    )

  • by mkl on 1/29/21, 10:42 PM

    VS2019 but Windows 7?

    A similar app is TidyTabs: https://www.nurgo-software.com/products/tidytabs

    Has anyone tried it? It's not open source, but "free for personal use".

  • by josephernest on 1/29/21, 9:45 PM

    Please add a screenshot to see how it looks like.

  • by kodablah on 1/30/21, 4:19 AM

    For anyone else wanting to, this might be fairly easy to do in Qt with QWindow::fromWinId and then using a tab widget. I have recently done similar w/ a POC to embed FF into a tabbed UI on Windows[0] when researching making a new browser backed by FF instead of Chromium (granted I used Go to test out their Qt binding at the time).

    0 - https://github.com/cretz/ffembedpoc

  • by wtfrmyinitials on 1/29/21, 9:46 PM

    The sway window manager has this feature built in and it's wonderful. I use it all the time.

  • by nxc18 on 1/29/21, 10:27 PM

    Stardock Groupy is a commercial supported utility that does the same thing, IIRC released during the long period when Microsoft was teasing Windows 10 Sets.

    https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/

    I think Microsoft must have abandoned sets when they moved to Edgium; their engineers were somehow under the impression that Sets was 100% dependent on Edge, and I think they must have been planning the feature as a cudgel against other browsers. IDK, I wish the Windows PMs were like 40% less user hostile and didn’t treat us like children to be manipulated.

    Tldr, Groupy is pretty cool and at least appears to fit in with the windows 10 desktop better than the open source utility, for a price.

  • by Gualdrapo on 1/29/21, 9:59 PM

    I miss when KDE had this in the KDE4 days. The only place I know where you can have window tabs by default is in Haiku.

  • by thunderbong on 1/30/21, 6:32 AM

  • by greggyb on 1/29/21, 10:01 PM

    I've had this for years in i3 on Linux.

  • by moyix on 1/29/21, 10:34 PM

    I remember enjoying this with Fluxbox back in 2003 or so :)

  • by rkagerer on 1/29/21, 10:31 PM

    Cool!

    If you want tabs in Windows Explorer, I've been using QTTabBar for years and it's pretty good.

  • by anthk on 1/29/21, 11:16 PM

    Fluxbox stacked applications on Window tabs, too. And still does.

  • by smusamashah on 1/29/21, 10:46 PM

    Is it for Windows 7 only? Will it work on Windows 10?

  • by reaperducer on 1/29/21, 9:50 PM

    Is this like the tabs in macOS Finder, or something better?