Wednesday, January 08, 2014

A User Interface Detail

I recently read Microinteractions. (recommended) It gives lots of small examples of user interface/experience, many from Little Big Details. Which made me think of one detail from Suneido.

In Suneido's IDE, the LibraryView code editor has tabs, like a lot of editors and IDE's and other software like browsers. Suneido uses the Windows tab control - pretty standard.


The Windows tab control lets you put an icon on the tab, again, nothing new.

We also have a right-click context menu on the tab with the usual option for closing the tab. But that's awkward if you want to close multiple tabs. I wanted a "close" button on the tabs, like you see in a lot of places, eg. Chrome


But the Windows tab control doesn't have an easy way to do that (AFAIK), so I "cheated" and just switched the icon when you moused over the tab. (Note: You still have to click on the actual close button, clicking anywhere else on the tab just selects it.)


Although I did it that way for expediency, it turned out to have a few nice benefits. One is that the close button doesn't take up space on every tab. Eclipse only shows the close button on the current selected tab, but it still reserves the space for it on all the other tabs:


But the benefit that I really like is that you can close a series of contiguous tabs by repeatedly clicking the close button of the leftmost one without moving the mouse. Whereas when the close button is on the right hand side of variable length tabs, you have to move the mouse to a new position after closing each tab. Chrome has mostly fixed length tabs, but they shrink/expand when required which still throws off the positioning. Admittedly, in some cases you could use the right-click context menu to close all the tabs, or close all except the current one. But this is simpler and also works to close N contiguous tabs by simply clicking N times in the same spot.

The downside of not always showing the close button is that it's not as discover-able. But in this case I don't think that's a big deal.

Obviously this is a pretty minor issue, but it surprises me that other tab controls (AFAIK) haven't used this approach.

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