October 16th, 2019

Document Management Improvements: Vertical document tabs are here!

Stephanie Su
Program Manager II

Demonstration of Vertical Tabs

We are excited to announce that the first preview of Vertical Document Tabs is available as part of Visual Studio version 16.4 Preview 2. Vertical tabs give you the option to better utilize horizontal screen space and at the same time gives more vertical space for your code. It lets you see more of your open document tabs and gives an intuitive and flexible way of ordering them.

Enabling Vertical Document Tabs

Vertical Tabs in Tools > Options

To try out vertical tabs, enable Vertical document tab layout feature by going to Tools > Options > Environment > Preview Features. Once the feature is enabled you will be able to see additional settings for vertical tabs under Tools > Options > Environment > Tabs and Windows and to easily change tab layouts between the three orientations (left, right, and top) with the document tab’s right-click context menu.

Two ways to change tab layout

What’s New in the Vertical Layout

While designing for the vertical layout, we took the opportunity to improve on today’s document management experience.

Easily Change Layouts

Easily switch your tabs to the left, to the right, and back to the top as needed with the right-click context menu.

Right-click context menu to change layout

Sorting

Take control of how your tabs will be opened. In addition to the default alphabetical sort, we’ve added the ability to have your tabs open via most recently opened as well. While alphabetical sort has a fixed order, most recently opened will allow you to rearrange the order of your tabs after opening them.

Change tab sort order

Vertical and Horizontal Document Groups

Vertical and horizontal document groups are also easily manageable with just one vertical tab well.

Vertical document groups with vertical document tabs

What’s Next?

Vertical Tabs

This is the first peek at the work we are doing in bringing vertical tabs to Visual Studio. For next steps, we will be monitoring all the feedback to identify any key missing features or enhancements needed for the feature.

Document Management

The Vertical Document Tabs feature is just one step in a larger effort to improve the document management experience in Visual Studio. We will be looking at other features that will help boost productivity like grouping, adding more sort types, and improving today’s horizontal tab experience. For a full list of suggestions we are tracking, take a look at this Developer Community ticket.

Try it out and let us know how we did!

Answer our survey here or through the Give Feedback link listed under our feature in Tools > Options > Environment > Preview Features > Vertical Document tab layout to help improve the feature.

Author

Stephanie Su
Program Manager II

26 comments

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  • Ronald Chambers

    Very good tool. All I’d like added is ability to change font size and vertical spacing between items. Or have an option to fit all the items within the space provided.

    Thanks,
    RONC

  • Hugo Quezada

    Such amazing feature.

    Will be interesting also have the option to have it in the left (or right) and in superior strip, as always.

    In my 29 inch screen looks amazing, actually I’m using like the 33% of the screen for code and the rest for undocked tools windows.

  • Neil MacMullen

    I posted this on feedback but perhaps more likely to get noticed here...

    I've just been playing around with the "vertical document tabs" feature which is quite nice but only has the ability to order files by the time they were opened. I often have a mix of files open - ones that I'm actively editing and ones I'm just using for reference or where I'm just touching a line or two to match changes...

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  • Chuck Ryan

    In all a good start, but some issues:

    Tab Groups - Like the concept but no way I would use it with it splitting the editor for each group without at least a 49" ultrawide monitor, and probably not even then as the IDE is busy enough without trying to see your teeny tiny colored line, at the top of the split to indicate which split goes with the group selected. Also the tab well looks...

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  • Michal Krchnavy

    Hello Stephanie,

    thank you, and your team very much for implementing such a cool feature.

    Please when do you expect to be released?

    (I’m currently using the customized version of Custom Document well, extension. Can’t live anymore with horizontal tabs :))

    Thank you,
    Michal

  • Kasper Bergh Østergaard

    Love this and in particular love the tab groups. That's real productivity value right there.

    I really want some kind of coloring by project or custom rules although it should be a bit subtle.
    And I really want more sorting options (by project, by type, completely custom instead of timestamp you can rearrange and probably more).

    A lot of people will complain about the whitespace - while I think it could perhaps be optimized a bit...

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  • Bryan Russell

    So glad to get the vertical tabs back. I resisted the move to 2019 simply because this was missing. Finally gave in and updated to VS2019, but never got used to the top tabs.

    Even more pleased with how splits are all handled within the one document well! Previously the two document wells consumed so much real estate that a left / right split was nearly impossible.

    Thanks so much to the entire team.

  • Francis Gomes

    I like this feature Vertical Document tabs. Previously, I would pin some frequently referred to documents which would occupy the top horizontal tab bar, and the transient ones would overflow into multiple tab bars. How does pinning behave in the vertical format?

    I had to uninstall VS 2019 due to the following usability features:
    1) New project dialog interface. Absolutely detest this interface. The previous interface served the purpose. The tree view was simple...

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    • Kasper Bergh Østergaard

      I strongly suspect #3 is because you hit the track pad with your wrists or similar while coding leading to unintentional clicks that will move the cursor. If you happened to also press shift when it happens a block of code will be selected and immediately overwritten as you keep typing.

      I’ve seen this exact issue sooooo many times.

    • Pratik NadagoudaMicrosoft employee

      The team and I are super interested in chatting with you about the new project dialog to understand how it doesn’t match up to your use cases. We’d love to learn more and see what we can do to improve the experience. Feel free to email me at prnadago at microsoft dot com. Thanks for the feedback!

      • Chuck Ryan

        Pratik, you have been posting these "let's have a chat" messages all over the place and under other circumstances it might be a good idea. But the fact is our feedback has not been, like you see in response to this feature, general approval and suggestions on how to make it better. No, our feedback has been that your team's design just does not fit the purpose of the dialog at all.

        When I am...

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  • Darren Knowles

    Excellent news, so glad to see this finally make it into Visual Studio as a native feature. I'm currently using the brilliant Custom Document Well in 2019 as horizontal tabs make VS inefficient to the point of unusable for even moderately large projects.

    Not sure I'll stop using the extension immediately though, tabs need to be colour coded based on the project they're in (the second most requested feature for VS 2019) but you're onto a...

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  • Michael Künneke

    Cool feature, especially for wide screens! It would be neat to have some sort of grouping/color coding by document type, e.g. XAML files go into one group, code files into another etc.