Status indicators in tabs

[Sean Egan]

On 6/25/07, Hylke Bons <h.bons at student.rug.nl> wrote:
> > What about people that only have one conversation open?
> Like it is now. No tabs.

I believe his question was, if vv depends on the tons of unused space
caused by a non-full left-tabbed conversation window, where do -vv
features go when there are no tabs? I would go further and say that I
use tabs along the left, and almost alwalys have the window completely
filled up; there'd be no place for -vv features there either.

left-tabs are good for me, since I almost always have tons and tons of
conversation windows. I suspect the average Pidgin user rarely has
more than a small handful conversations open (especially the ones who
are obsessive about closing the window after every message), in which
case top or bottom tabs are great. I really think we got this right.
Default to top, allow left (left vertical and right vertical are
probably pusing it, though ;))

> I do. There can be simple buttons/icons at the bottom that indicate what
> features are
> available in the conversation. Or anything else.

I thought your whole idea behind the infopane was that we could shove
toolbar-like-functionality there. Now you want to put it in some
obscure, non-persistant, ass-crack of the GtkNotebook, where it
doesn't seem to be a part of any conversation.

> When there are a lot of tabs open you only see Hy..., #pi... #ta... And
> when there are too many tabs
> there are arrows.

That's why I'm currently defending removing the status icons. When
these and the close button are both disabled, you maximize the number
of tabs you can see before arrows are needed, and still get to see
most of people's names up until that point.

Using GtkButton instead of GtkNotebook tabs will not solve this problem, anyway.

-s.