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
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.
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.
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.
Vertical and Horizontal Document Groups
Vertical and horizontal document groups are also easily manageable with just one vertical tab well.
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.
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
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.
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 in the "main" file. Sorting by open-time just results in a confusing arrangement and I waste time trying to get back to a...
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 like it is associated to the first split but not the additional splits.
Project Groups - Add a way to group by project, without splitting the...