Bug 15826

Summary: [Editor Mgmt] Editor tab icons take up needed space
Product: [Eclipse Project] Platform Reporter: Kevin McGuire <Kevin_McGuire>
Component: UIAssignee: Platform-UI-Inbox <Platform-UI-Inbox>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3 CC: erich_gamma
Version: 2.0Keywords: investigate, usability
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:

Description Kevin McGuire CLA 2002-05-12 13:29:39 EDT 
(Post 2.0 thoughts)

When you have a lot of editors open, the tabs get shrunk down to the point 
where you generally cannot differentiate the tabs unless you wait for the hover 
help.  This is because only a a few characters of label text remain visible.

It would be interesting to investigate not showing the editor tab icons when 
reaching minimum tab sizing.  When space is at a premium, giving priority to 
the text would provide more unique information than showing the icons which 
convey very little information, especially in the common cases where they're 
all the same file type (eg. all java files). This would reclaim about 3 
characters based on the fonts etc. I am using.

This leaves the problem though of what to do with the error decorator which 
normally decorates the tab icon.
Comment 1 Nick Edgar CLA 2002-05-13 10:37:36 EDT 
The icon is important for error decorations, and JDT relies on this behaviour 
to minimize the use of the task list.  It is particularly useful in the Java 
Browsing perspective.

I suspect that having distinguishing icons is more important for other products 
with many types of editors, e.g. WSAD.

However, the space lost to icons in the editor tabs is significant.
Should reconsider for v3.
Comment 2 Randy Giffen CLA 2002-08-12 09:44:12 EDT 
Reopen for investigation
Comment 3 Andrew Irvine CLA 2003-04-10 13:07:47 EDT 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 25165 ***