Haiku window with tab on top looks like this:
A Haiku window without tab would look like this:
A Haiku window with a temporarily activated (by hovering the mouse over the top edge of the window, or by pressing a certain keyboard key) window tab:
Var1:
Var2:
Var3:
(which looks better?)
All other functions with windows with temporarily activated tabs remain the same as with always-shown window tabs (also merging windows, scrolling tabs).
A slightly different option with a hidden window tab, with separate pop-up window controls, each of which is triggered when the mouse pointer is hovered over a specific area of ​​the window frame.
Window close control active:
Window title active:
Window resize control active:
I like tabs visible.
Makes it easy to stack
I personally miss Window Tiling more…
This demonstrates a problem with the concept: The possibility of obscuring menus. The default menu structure would have to be shifted 25-30 pixels to the right. Not the end of the world, I suppose.
I’m less worried about obscuring the icon on the right. Only Tracker uses it, really, and there are a dozen other ways to move folders around.
I imagine that this would be an optional setting.
Even for separate windows… with Shift+Mouse+WindowTabDragDown… and window tab goes away (hides).
So, with such a new feature, it would be possible not only to remove an unwanted tab, but to have a group of connected windows like this:
…Of course still it would also be very nice to have windows tiling to the edges of the screen in Haiku like in other modern OSes…
I like that: taking the existing ability to drag tabs left or right and extending it downwards.
Sorry, that is the first thing I switch off in any “modern OS”. I don’t mind a menu that gives me choices like “Left half”, “Top half” and so on, but I really hate it when I am minding my own business, dragging a window out of the way, and suddenly it goes fullscreen because it got too close to a screen edge.
How about when tiling the windows the tab is allowed to be obscured behind another window, but when the window is focused the tab comes back on top?
So if two windows are tiled but the top one is focused, it looks like this:
Then when the bottom one is focused the tab pops back on top:
OK, so you lose some space at the top of the screen. But this avoids the problem of losing the tab and not knowing the shortcut to get it back… which I imagine can be a really annoying issue otherwise.
Or, perhaps the tab could just be reduced in size but still have a hint that it can be expanded back up?
The window is displayed in full screen when you don’t want it to be annoying… I try to avoid that.
Alternatively, it could be made to only work with the command key on the keyboard.
The window tab should reappear when the mouse pointer is hovered over the top frame of the window. It should be active for some time (2s?) so that the user has time to “pick it up”, when it would be active as long as the mouse pointer is over it.
That sounds like it could work!
The Openbox (stacking) window manager has this feature built-in: You can switch window decorations on/off at will, and set a keyboard shortcut for this. It is useful when screen real estate is limited, or when you can never have enough vertical space to work with. It is not a killing feature, but you get 2 more lines of code visible during programming sessions. As far I know, more “sophisticated” stacking window managers / desktops don’t have such an option (but there are hacks to set window decorations off on a per-window basis). Tiling window managers are a different story; Almost all of them ditch decorations completely.
On my GNU/Linux / FreeBSD machines, I use Openbox and I set window decorations off by default (just a frame is drawn around each window; no title bar, no resize handles). I’m not sure I would do the same on Haiku, though. After all, the title tab is not just iconic, it has special features as well. Still, it would be nice as an optional feature.
This seems like a good idea for window tiling, and I think it shouldn’t get in the way of anything else.
There are some decisions to make on it: how it works with focus follows mouse vs click to focus, for example. To avoid the tab popping up when you are trying to target the bottom of the upper window (say, an horizontal scrollbar) and you overshoot a bit.
There is already code in app_server to move the tabs to the left side of the window (very rarely used, but it’s there), this could be experimented with in a simialr way, as a private window look bit.
Maybe some kind of “mouse focus hysteresis” so that the focus does not change until you are some way past the border of an adjacent window, only used in this specific case where there are tiled windows joined on upper/lower borders. And perhaps only active for some short time period (100-500ms perhaps) after which if the mouse stays in the lower window the focus switches?
(I have no idea about implementing this though 
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