Feature idea: option to always show tabbar

Desktop
1

This is wrt nautilus file manger / gnome-files

Is there a option/way to make the tabbar always show even if there is only one tab.

  • This is a boolean checkbox type option
  • It could be in the gui preferences or gsettings or dconf-edit
  • Such features are common in tabbed terminal apps because its common to open more than one tab, and it avoids gui re-adjustments.

As an additional option, one could have an option for “behavior on closing last tab”

  • choose between
    • disable closing of the last tab (grey out the close-button-on tab-overlay)
    • or close the nautilus window on closing the last tab.
  • Mozilla Firefox has this option

I was happy to discover that ctrl-T beings up a second tab, and shows the tab-bar. Presently, the showing of the tab bar requires at least two tabs to be open, and the tab bar is hidden again when one is down to the last tab.

== Additional Info
root@sirius:~/tmp/sdultra# rpm -qa | grep -Ei “gnome-shell-4|nautilus-4”
gnome-shell-46.2-1.fc40.x86_64
nautilus-46.2-1.fc40.x86_64

2

Hi. Thanks for sharing your ideas. It would be interesting to learn why you’ve had this idea.

3

I just recently upgraded to Fedora 40. I was surprised to discover that nautilus did tabs. When the tab-bar is toggled the gui adjusts itself, I find that a bit disconcerting. It isn’t too bad, I could get used to it. It does a quick and smooth animated scroll down. It does feel very polished. For habits reasons, that’s when I instinctively started looking around the preferences to see if its possible to set things to the way i like tabs in wezterm and firefox.

Tabbed usage in the file browser is convenient as it avoids window-clutter. I use double commander often and am used to tabs. So It’s even better if its like double-commander where there are two panes, and each pane can have tabs. Windows Explorer in win11 has also started to introduce tabs.

I also prefer, as I’ve done on Firefox, to be able to fix a max-tabwidth and min-tabwidth, both to say 50pt, rather than expand/divide the whole length of the tabbar, which is what I think nautilus is doing. That way mouse/touchpad movements for moving between tabs is independent of the number of tabs on the tabbar. Excess tabs are shown on a scroll bar. Long folder-names truncate, but can be read from the hover-tooltip.

4

I see where you are coming from now.

There are many ways to do tabbed interfaces. All of them have advantages and disadvantages. Your preferences are valid as any other. But GNOME tabs do not work that way.

GNOME apps try to “do one thing and do it well”. That’s why you will not see the same fine-tuning options as found in Mozilla Firefox.

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5

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