✨ Allow creating multiple tab rows (or atleast API for extension authors)

[jd-solanki]

🤔 Why?

I use pinned tabs always and pin my regularly visited tabs. Pinned tabs goes in top row and rest of the temp tabs stays in the second row.

This is great and today I realized about new feature that allows managing the tabs more easily.

• Mostly we work on multiple modules and we get lost on finding the exact tab for the module (e.g. payment module's schemas).
• This makes it even harder when we debug and has to open multiple tabs to figure out what's wrong with the code. As shown in below screenshot some tabs might gets hidden under scrolling due to large number of open tabs.
  
• For vertical monitors second points makes much more sense as we atleast open 4-5 tabs and we might lost 1-2 tabs under scrolling

If we allow managing tabs in multiple rows that'll make it more managable to work on multiple modules in large projects.

Why Not?

• User might create large numbers of rows which results in weird looking UI but that's the way user might benefit most

Conclusion

I know VSCode might not allow this kind of feature directly because there's lots more to do on AI side as of now but providing extensions API for this will allow extension author to come up with creative ideas and later if it looks common feature then we can integrate it in VSCode

[gjsjohnmurray]

Are you aware of the Open Editors view? Would the "explorer.openEditors.sortOrder": "fullPath" setting help there?

[benibenj]

Also, would having tab groups be helpful to you? #100335

[jd-solanki]

Are you aware of the Open Editors view? Would the "explorer.openEditors.sortOrder": "fullPath" setting help there?

Thanks, that config is nice but don't provides groups it just sorts the editor. We still have to figure out the group.

Also, would having tab groups be helpful to you? #100335

Yes, That mak sense but even with that due to limit available horizontal space we have to close other groups and will require additional click to view the available editors in another group.

For now, I've two workaround that I found:

• Thanks to @gjsjohnmurray I found this extension that allows tree view in open editors.
• Vertical editor groups also does the same job but we've to look for editor group in bottom to access editors of other groups.

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Closing this for now as long as workaround works 😉

[jd-solanki]

This was quick re-open 😅

I replicated the expected UI with the help of the editor groups:

Issues with this approach

• When we switch to editor group which is not last rest of the editor groups moves down and we've to move cursor all the way down to open specific editor. This will be nightmare for people using vertical monitor.
• If we want to open two 1/2 editors side-by-side then we manually have to move down rest of the editor groups by dragging them. The layout I'm talking about is below:
  
  (The problem is if I try to open another editor group horizontally have 1/2 space then vertical editor group also occupies half vertical space rather then staying on bottom)

I guess there's already moveEditor API that is being used for pinning tabs.

When we'll have tab groups we can even label the tab row for better readability.

[vs-code-engineering]

This feature request is now a candidate for our backlog. The community has 60 days to upvote the issue. If it receives 20 upvotes we will move it to our backlog. If not, we will close it. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!