Pinned tabs: show them in a secondary tab row above others

[bpasero]

Refs: #12622

Pinned tabs by default will show to the left of other tabs. An alternative presentation is to do what Visual Studio does and have a secondary tab row above the others:

vs what we do today:

[yannlairdc]

Here's why I would like to get the pinned tab VS style:

I use pinned tab has my main work focus. I usually have between 2 to 5 tabs pinned and all the tab noise of opening / looking / searching / inspecting is kept out of it. So when I find what I'm looking for, I can instantly go back to the focused tabs and they are clearly delimited on their own row.

It's a huge productivity booster for me to be able to organise tab like that.

[bpasero]

@yannlairdc pinned tabs in VSCode are always the first tabs of the row and never scroll out of view, does that still require a secondary row then?

[yannlairdc]

@bpasero It's all about visibility and speed of access to what you're looking for. I will say that having this improvement without the other feature to display the full name of the pinned files reduces the value of that one alone.

When I'm looking for something or iterating through references in the code, I can go back to where I was at the glance of an eye. I know it's going to be on the first row, I know it's not going to move whatever I do and I know which tab I need to go back to with the name displayed.

It allows me in my head to have the first row as my area of focus, while everything in the second row is just "noise" that I disregard.

Having everything pinned in the first rows without the name display is a nice addition, but not quite there for me.
The reason it works well with chrome tabs is because the content of those pinned tab never changes and it's easy to recognise the icon of the website in case of doubt. Witt VS Code, the files pinned changes regularly and most of the time they are of the same type.

Having 7 pinned tabs with a C# icon on them would still force me to iterate on each tab until I find back the tab I'm interested in, while pushing to the right all the others opened tab.

[bpasero]

@yannlairdc yeah understood, assume you have a setting to show the name of a tab even when pinned. Would that be sufficient to not add another row of tabs?

[yannlairdc]

@bpasero That would be another good step in the right direction for sure, but it wouldn't solve all the problems. If you have 6 or 7 pinned tabs with their full names displayed, their's a high chance that it will occupy most of the screen and left out the non pinned tabs.

By the way, I just realised something by looking at both VS and Code and the tabs in Code are much bigger than in VS, which makes the above problems more critical (see below).

If I have 6 pinned tabs, it would occupy most of the space opened on my 27" screen. Is there any option to be able to reduce the size? Or put them on several rows maybe?

[bpasero]

@yannlairdc you might want to check out "workbench.editor.tabSizing": "shrink" setting which will ensure tabs start to shrink to a minimum of 80px when space is limited.

To be clear: I would only suggest a solution that makes pinned tabs shrink too so that you can have many pinned tabs side by side without starting to scroll. E.g. one idea is to make every pinned tab shrink as if "workbench.editor.tabSizing": "shrink" as configured.

[yannlairdc]

@bpasero If we can get the pinned tab on a separate row, this problem almost solves itself.

[bpasero]

I am trying to find a design alternative that does not require a second row of tabs which I personally find very heavy visually.

[yannlairdc]

I understand that not everyone would like a second row, but that's what I'm looking for (and that's the title of this enhancement request ^^).

I'm not asking for it to be the default behavior or to replace current implementation, I would just like the ability to configure it this way for me and other likeminded people (lot of them requested that specific behavior to be implemented on the original pinned tabs topic).

[GreenAirplane]

I 100% agree with @yannlairdc. I have exactly the same use case. In most cases, I have 3-5 pinned tabs and a bunch of tabs on the 2nd row in VS. The ability to have full names for the pinned tabs is crucial as well because e.g. if I'm working on some backend feature then all or most of my files will be *.cs.

One more thing, with the ability to pin tabs, it would be nice to have the option to "Close all but pinned" tabs.