Is there a way to disable tabs?

[Tabless in Portland]

As the title says: is there any way to disable document tabs in Affinity Designer?

 

Since it doesn't use the standard Mac window tab behavior, it doesn't work the same as other tabs, and it doesn't even work well.  It often tries to join windows that I'm dragging that aren't anywhere near each other.  It often gets stuck and leaves half my screen in a sickly orange highlight (even after the mouse button is released), until I drag some other AD document to a new AD window to reset it.

 

I'm really getting sick of all the non-standard behavior that just doesn't work right.

 

Can I at least disable tabs?  I never wanted them, I trigger them by accident all the time, and when it does trigger it often exhibits weird drawing bugs.  I suppose somebody likes them but I just want them to go away.

 

thanks.

[MikeW]

Dear Tabless in Portland,

 

No, I don't think so. But I am using Windows so take that for what it's worth.

 

Signed,

 

Tabbed Outside Portland

[R C-R]

Your description is too vague to tell if you are talking about something happening while in Affinity Designer's Separated Mode (first item on the Windows menu) or something else, but at least on my system (specs below in my sig) in that mode it works just like tabs in Safari or Finder -- document windows do not get stuck while dragging with anything oddly highlighted, nor does it try to merge two windows into a single tabbed one unless I drag one of their title bars until it is aligned vertically with the other one, the mouse pointer overlaps it, & I hover it there briefly. Likewise, dragging a tabbed document out of the merged window works exactly like it does in Safari or Finder.

 

In the default single window (unseparated) mode it works as expected -- document tabs can only be closed or dragged left or right to reorder them, & only one tabbed document window can be visible at a time, just as in Safari or Finder.

 

Please tell us which mode you are using when you see this, the OS version you are running on your Mac, & if you have installed anything like a third party utility that could in any way alter the normal window behavior of your system.

[Tabless in Portland]

I'm seeing this on both my 10.11.6 and 10.12.4 Macs.  I have no third party utilities installed.  I'm using "Separated Mode", i.e., plain old one-window-per-document.

 

Tabs in AD definitely do not work anything at all like Safari, or the Finder, or any other Mac app I have, and I'm not sure why you say that they do.  For example:

 

 - When I drag one normal Safari/Finder/etc window over another normal Safari/Finder/etc window, nothing happens.  When I drag one normal AD window over another normal AD window, the whole thing turns bright green (or orange or whatever my highlight color is) until I release the mouse button.  Even if you're not using tabs, AD assumes that simply moving a window near another one means "I want tabs".

 

 - In Safari/Finder/etc, then, if I want to never use tabs, it's easy: simply never press command-T ("New Tab").  In AD, there is no command-T to create a tab, so the (only) way to avoid getting tabs is to be extra careful never to drag a window too close to any other window (!).

 

 - In Safari/Finder/etc, if I do start to drag a tab and don't want to move it to another window, I can simply press Escape before I release the mouse button to put everything back where it was before I started.  In AD, pressing Escape during a drag doesn't do anything: once you started moving a tab, you're committed.

 

 - If Safari/Finder/etc, if I want to drag a tab to somewhere on the screen which happens to be occupied by another window (which has tabs), but I don't want it to be a tab in that window, I can hold down the Command key to force it to be a normal drag, not an "insert tab into this window" drag.  In AD, pressing Command during a drag doesn't do anything: if you're dragging it near another window, that window will swallow it, and there's nothing you can do about it (except not move it there).

 

 - In Safari/Finder/etc, windows can only merge with windows on the same space, so you never have to worry about remembering where all your windows are located on other spaces.  In AD, dragging a window to a position on screen where a window is even on another space is enough to trigger the "create tabs" behavior.

 

 - In Safari/Finder/etc, dragging to create a tab indicates this, visually, by making a little gray tab and showing exactly where it will appear in the tab bar.  In AD, it indicates this by highlighting the entire window.  It's true that this usually doesn't get stuck-on, but sometimes it does.  I haven't figured out exactly what causes it, but it's definitely buggy in some cases.

 

 

Is that specific enough?  All of this is exceptionally frustrating.  I've been using Macs for 30 years, and I've never seen any app where I couldn't drag a window near another window without something funky happening.

 

I just want to go back to AD before it had tabs.  AD has some great features but they're stuck behind this home-grown UI toolkit that makes me want to put my fist through the screen.

[R C-R]

- When I drag one normal Safari/Finder/etc window over another normal Safari/Finder/etc window, nothing happens.

When I drag the title bar of one un-tabbed Safari window over another Safari window something does happen: the dragged window shrinks to a tab & a space opens up in the title bar of the other window so I can drop it there, resulting in that window becoming a tab in the title bar. Likewise, dragging the title bar or a tab in it out of the window results in a smaller proxy version that can be dropped somewhere else on the screen, where it expands into a new window, or a new tab if it is dropped on another Safari window.

 

Finder behaves the same way.

 

This is not significantly different from the behavior I see in Affinity -- nothing ever gets stuck, & an Affinity document window merges into a tab in another Affinity document window only if I drag its title bar onto the title bar of the other one, the mouse pointer is over both title bars, & I hover it there briefly. At that time the dragged window highlights & if I release the mouse button, it will merge into a new tab in the other window, but only if the pointer remains in the title bar. Title bars are relatively small targets so I have never done this by accident -- in fact, it is a bit harder to do on purpose than in Safari because in the latter the dragged title bar can be dropped anywhere in the other window.

 

Un-tabbing works exactly as it does in Safari or Finder -- same small proxy once it is dragged out of the tile bar & so on.

 

As far as I know, this obeys all the required Apple developer guidelines for tabbed app behavior & causes no bugs in Affinity, Finder, or any other app that meets those guidelines.