Reducing tab size

[Sean Egan]

I still believe that the conversation tabs' primary goal in life
should be organizing conversations. A huge part of this is having as
many tabs visible at a time.

It has been counter-argued that most people do not have enough
conversations open to justify my insanity, but right now I have a
reasonably-sized conversation open that fits only two conversations.
Additionally, it's been argued that the changes we've made to allow
people to use smaller windows are a waste of space, as our tabs do not
allow usable small-sized windows, anyway.

Because I enjoy being shot down and flamed, I've decided to post some
potential ideas.

- Remove the status icon. It does nothing absolutely to organize
conversations, and occupies a relatively large amount of space. To
everyone who argues that the infopane's icon is redundant to the tab,
I argue that the tab's icon is redundant to the infopane.

- Remove the close button. With middle-click-to-close, you don't gain
actually gain anything from the close button, although I wouldn't
expect anyone to actually find middle-click-to-close on their own. We
may also want to show a close button only on the active tab, which is
what Firefox does when it has too many tabs to display. This is
already optional, which is probably enough. Perhaps make the default
no-close-buttons.

- Truncate tab labels to the nearest space or '@' I don't think this
will actually have much an effect on tab width, unless you're using an
ancient, non-ellipsizing version of GTK+, but I think I'd rather see
"devel" than "devel at co..."

- Write a new GtkNotebook widget that does everything just the way we
want it. What would we want from such a thing?