Tabs Studio Blog (organizing Visual Studio document tabs)

I’ve added a new option to show tabs in a separate window:

The separate window is a Visual Studio tool window that you can dock or float any place you like:

You set up tabs window width and height, Tabs Studio fits tabs into available width. Tabs window placement is saved by Visual Studio as for all other tool windows. If you have several tab groups, several tabs windows are opened.

I’ve also added the TabsStudio.Connect.ShowTabsWindow command in case you (accidentally) have closed the window. You can add this command to the Visual Studio View menu for example:

The Show tabs in a separate window option is currently not supported in MDI mode and in VS 2010.

In SSMS sometimes you can get 10 or even more tabs in one group. A group like this takes lot of space and can be hard to manage. I’ve added the Maximum number of tabs in a group option that breaks extra large groups:

Default value is 7. For example, 9 SQL queries are now organized in two groups instead of a large one:

Setting the Maximum number of tabs in a group option to 0 allows any number of tabs to be combined in one group.

Currently, if you try to disable tab grouping by emptying Title grouping regex or Path grouping regex it doesn’t work – empty regex is interpreted as “use default settings”. It is safe, but counterintuitive and for the next Tabs Studio version I’ve changed empty regex to mean “disable tab grouping”. If you want to disable tab grouping in the current version – write something non-capturing like “don’t group” as a regex.

If you enter invalid regex (e.g. “?” that shows the error parsing “?” – Quantifier {x,y} following nothing) and save it, then, again, default settings are used for tab grouping. I think safety of default settings is still valuable here.

“Unlike Visual Studio, Tabs Studio displays the tab for every open document in both the SDI and MDI configurations. If there is not enough horizontal space to display every tab, Tabs Studio stacks them vertically.” Read full review.