When you have lots of tabs open in Visual Studio, your horizontal screen resolution determines how many will fit the Tab Well. The remaining document tabs won’t be shown unless you enable multi-row tabs. But what if you don’t want to lose the coding space multi-row tabs take up, and still need an easier way to get an overview of all your open documents? Here’s how we might fix it and we need your help!
You might already be familiar with the experience of hovering over tabs and using the mouse wheel to scroll through them in some browsers and other applications. The Custom Document Well extension brought this feature in Visual Studio in older versions, but the extension was discontinued years ago due to changes in the architecture of Visual Studio itself. Mouse wheel scrolling wasn’t built in after this change due to several reasons, and the feature had to be reimagined to properly function under this new architecture.
For many years, Visual Studio has used a different method to show all open document tabs. Click the chevron on the right of the Tab Well to see the full list.
And more recently in Visual Studio 2022, the concept of multi-row tabs was introduced. It allows you to spread all your open document tabs onto multiple rows, so each tab is always visible.
However, we’ve noticed that a feature request for using the mouse scroll wheel has been gaining steam recently. Please vote and comment if you agree.
In conversations with the users that have requested this feature, we’ve heard the following:
- It’s too cumbersome to get an overview of all open tabs
- I don’t want to enable multi-row tabs while coding because it takes up vertical space
- I got muscle memory using the scroll wheel on tabs from other apps
So, with increased interest and a better understanding of the root problems, what would the right solution look like for Visual Studio users? One that would complement the existing features in Visual Studio.
Let’s do an experiment and find out!
The experiment
We’re starting out with an extension to kick off the experiment. We call it Scroll Tabs and the first iteration enables a solution to all three problems.
When your mouse hovers over the document tabs and you scroll the mouse wheel, the multi-line tabs feature is toggled on and off as shown in the video above. When you then click a tab to show the document, the multi-row tabs are disabled again to free up the vertical space.
Next steps
If this feature is interesting to you, please install the Scroll Tabs extension and take it for a ride. Make sure to share any ideas and bugs on the GitHub issue tracker, and feel free to send pull requests too. The feature request ticket is a suitable place to share your comments and thoughts, so make sure to vote and comment there as well.
Do you like the idea of community experiments like this one? Let us know in the comments below.
How can it be this dumb? Can’t you just copy some of the designs from VSCode? The tabs without icons are just way too difficult to distinguish. Do you even understand the pain of having to look for and differentiate `MainPage.xaml` `MainPage.idl` `MainPage.h` `MainPage.cpp`?
It’s something.
I’d still love to see this improvement: Grouping open files that differ only in extension.
Thanks for sharing this. Nice to give this a try before it is potentially included.
Having to switch between many tabs is definitely an issue in some of the solutions I work on. I already found the multi-row tab an improvement and I like the idea of "collapsable" tab rows and it works quite well, but like one of the commenters I have my doubts this is not very intuitive when you don't know about...
I’ve downloaded it and will give it a try. There’re some solutions I work with which have a lot of files in them, so this could be helpful.
My only concern, at this point, is this feature probably won’t be easily discoverable.
That’s great step, as we use multiple monitors to get separator views, now i’ll try this method? and let see hows its work.
This is nice, for a fairly narrow range of open tabs. Too many to fit in one line, but not so many as to still swamp multiple lines.
I think it fails to address the underlying issue which is: "I want to get back to a tab I was looking at before, but I can't find it".
If we take a step back and consider what the point of Tabs is at all, that might help. As...
What I don't understand is: why is there no file "grouping" feature? We have many tabs open for a reason, because many files belong together as a set. I'm not talking about design files and its code-behind files. I'm talking about architecturally related files. What files belong together is something VS doesn't know and can't know. But that doesn't matter, I could simply define these files as a group. And then open and close this...
I am a hoarder of web links in my browser, and often have over 70 pages open for reference, so I am used to grouping tabs together to save space and organise related pages.
Rather than invent something unique, where the user must train themselves, can we not just copy the tab-grouping mechanism used in latest browsers?
Note: The only feature I do not like in browsers, is you cannot drop tabs onto a closed...
This is really a very interesting feature proposal, I can already see it applied in my project where I have the classical Business, Data, Model classes and usually they are logically grouped (by table or group of tables related) and going up and down vertical tabs or Solution explorer is not exactly easy.
Your concept would really help, as I think it would also help the possibility to order in a custom way projects instead...
Melissa,
You can group tabs with my Tabs Studio extension: https://tabsstudio.com/documentation/visual_studio_tab_grouping.html.
Hm, no. That's not what I had in mind. This feels over-engineered and over-complicated. I want something on-the-fly, on-demand and just for 10 minutes in some cases. I don't want to define regular expressions, filters and all that stuff. I can't even explain to myself what files belong together, it's more intuition what belongs together or not. And I will not rename files just to satisfy extensions. I want to click on five files and...
Hey Melissa,
before Visual Studio 2022 i used Save all the Tabs. While it didn’t include colors for the grouping it was super easy to just save, close and open sets of tabs.
Maybe this would be a starting point for the discussion?
That’s a super interesting idea. I could see how that could be used for many different things such as React components etc.
I personally gave up on Visual Studio's tab paradigm a number of years ago and just moved the tabs to the left (instead of the default top). Now I can see them all, I still get color coding and grouping and best of all I don't pull all of my hair out because they keep moving around all over the place. I appreciate the idea behind this extension but I feel like the core problem...
This is actually pretty slick. Minimal clicks, unobtrusive, and fast. Keep up the good work!
Glad you like it. I feel the same 🙂
I really like the vertical tab layout on my widescreen monitor. But it would be great if this could be controlled per window. When I tear some tabs out to a smaller monitor I would like the tabs on top, as the vertical layout consumes too much space. Maybe a setting that disabled vertical tabs for windows with teared out tabs inside?