Kate’s Tab Bar Plugins
by Dominik • April 25, 2011 • Users • 16 Comments
If you check Kate’s plugin list, you will recognize that there are two different tab bar plugins available. The first one is Tabify. This plugin adds a standard KDE tab bar to the top of Kate’s main window:
The plugin shows the same entries as the “Documents” tool view on the left. With drag&drop, the tabs can be moved around. In KDE SC <= 4.6.2 this plugin is called Tabify. In KDE SC >= 4.6.3 the name is simply “Tab Bar”.
There is another plugin, called Tab Bar Extension in KDE SC <=4.6.2 (and Multiline Tab Bar in KDE SC >=4.6.3) that also adds a tab bar to Kate’s mainwindow:
As can be seen, this tab bar can be configured to span multiple lines in order to show more documents at the same time. Further, there are features like tab highlighting so that a document can quickly be found when working on a huge list of documents. There are more options in the configure dialog of this plugin (click small configure button on the right). In KDE 4.7, it is possible to change to highlight a tab by clicking on it with the middle mouse button and clear the highlight with CTRL+middle-click.
There have been requests to remove the non-standard plugin from Kate and just provide the standard conform Tabify plugin. I was about to do that, but then, we do have users that use the multiline tab bar. And as it works well and provides some features the default tab bar does not have, I’ve finally decided to keep it.
It is worth to mention that there were quite a lot of voices in the past requesting a tab bar. It was even requested to remove the “Documents” tool view, listing all the documents. However both tab bar plugins are not able to provide easy access to the opened documents, if you have e.g. 50 documents opened. Hence, the Documents tool view will remain the default, just as it always was in Kate’s life 
> There have been requests to remove the non-standard plugin
> from Kate and just provide the standard conform Tabify plugin.
> I was about to do that, but then, we do have users that use
> the multiline tab bar.
That’s right
> And as it works well and provides some features the default
> tab bar does not have, I’ve finally decided to keep it.
And also, it’s more space-efficient, even if you just use a single row.
I’d love to be able to pin some documents from the document list to the tabbar ! Some kind of favorites or frequently used documents in a project (css file in a web project, etc)… And many thanks for this great editor
I find this idea very cool by the way. Maybe we can have a extended mode (just as now) and a reduced mode (only show the highlighted items)…
From the first time I used Kate I thought that the document list eats many space in the window. It’s opened by default and one doesn’t have an option to hide it by default. I love the tabbar, but you are right about it’s not appropiate for many opened documents. But all people don’t have many documents opened in Kate. Maybe a pop-up menu would be better, in my humble opinion.
There is more space for the options than space for the text. Typical kde app.
Will this end up in KDevelop as well? That’d be cool..
No, because it is a Kate application plugin (and not a KTextEditor plugin)… sorry.
This triggers another interesting discussion: the visibility of non official plugins. How about creating an official place to showcase kate plugins? Can be as simple as a wiki where each developer can link their own webpages/repos?
Yes, right now, Kate does not have platform where everyone can upload plugins. The only official places are
1. the Kate git module
2. kde-apps.org
I’ve been using Kate for a long time and I’m currently using Tab Bar for its multi-line setup and extra configuration options.
One thing that has bugged me for a long time is that, regardless of the tab plugin, I have not been able to assign keyboard shortcuts to switching tabs, so I always need to select the tab manually with the mouse to change it. Currently, ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab just handle indentation instead of switching tabs (like every other tabbed application). Am I missing how to get this set up or am I the only one that wants this functionality?
Right now, it’s not possible to assign shortcuts.
thank you for your great work so far, but PLEASE give us the option to use ctrl + tab to change tabs.. it’s standard everywhere and it is very efficient to change tabs that way. also there is the “alt + 1″ or “alt + 2″ or any other number which also switches tabs.. i just tried kate and thought wow what a great editor, and then I found out I cannot change tabs efficiently =(
oh, it can be done through shortcuts.. at least the part of it (ctrl + tab). sorry for that. but it would still be nice though if we could switch between tabs with “alt + [number]“
Does this Multiline Tab Bar widget available for other KDE apps?
For example it will be very good to use in Kopete tabs, for solve bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54194
Seems that there are no QT integrated libraries for multi-row or vertical tabs, so we are searching other libraries for this.
It’s not a library. However, when I wrote the tabbar I had in mind that maybe it would be useful for others as well. In other words, you can copy the files katetinytab*.cpp/h from https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-baseapps/kate/repository/revisions/master/show/kate/plugins/tabbarextension and use it out of the box.
Would be great if Tabify allows browsing the next/previous tab using the tab order, not the file opening order.