Reducing tab size

[Michael]

It seems that just putting tabs on the left/right side of the
conversations solves the problem of not enough space.  I don't
understand why anyone would want tabs at the top except in a web browser
where a huge window is really needed to view web pages.  I can probably
get 9 or 10 conversations into a window with no problems at all, and
that's using the smallest window size I'm comfortable reading IMs from,
about 500x350 pixels (If that seems a bit large, it's because my monitor
is 1920x1200)

The status icon is something I love having in the tabs, and really
missed it a lot when it was gone for a while.  I keep lots of
conversations open and it's useful to see if someone has gone away, gone
offline, or come back online, so I can close the tab if I want to
without even moving to it.  Also, this is more of a personal preference
issue, but it just looked plain weird without the icons.

Defaulting show close button to off would be fine.  Just be sure to
leave it as an option. :)

Sean Egan wrote:
> 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?
> 
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