Treestyletab: Making a tab a child of another requires very precise mouse movement

Created on 21 Jun 2016 · 14Comments · Source: piroor/treestyletab

Tree Style Tab allows dragging a tab (or tab tree) and dropping it into another (target) tab to make it a child of the target tab.

However, I find that accomplishing this requires very precise mouse movement. There is a very small window of space where the target tab is active to accept the source tab as a child. A little bit before, it becomes a previous-sibling; a little bit after, it becomes a next-sibling. As a result, particularly with a laptop touchpad, the operation often requires several attempts.

Is it possible to tweak things to make this window of space larger, to make this easier to accomplish?

partially fixed

Source

HighCommander4

Most helpful comment

Thanks - I tried the updated build, and it helps in some cases, but there are still cases where it's very difficult to make one tab a child of another. For example, please see the following screencapture where I try to make the Yahoo tab (with a child tab of its own) be the child of the Google tab for > 10 seconds, and fail:

treestyletab

HighCommander4 on 7 Jul 2016

👍3

All 14 comments

I haven't ploblem,at least me.
I always use poor environment that unsuitable for development such as screen size is 1280×1080 and using touch pad (because I have no money :-<).
But I operated comfortably.

in my opinion, if you use windows,why don't you configure mouse tracking speed?

lv7777 on 21 Jun 2016

By the commit 4583c22c26b496516bb50aa9be1a8bbbcdd8657e the drop area of each tab is now enlarged. I think that it becomes more easier to drop something onto a tab, including another tab. The development build is available: http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/xpi/nightly/

piroor on 5 Jul 2016

I close this for now. If the problem is still there, please add a comment.

piroor on 5 Jul 2016

treestyletab

HighCommander4 on 7 Jul 2016

👍3

Thank for the video. I have this problem very often.
Sometimes I have to close the browser and restart it to get it working.

Tragen on 9 Jul 2016

Maybe it would be a good idea to use the horizontal location of the mouse to determine the level that the user is trying to interact with.
For example: make a drag-and-drop target appear in every tab when dragging. Dropping into the target makes the dragged tabs a child of that tab. Maybe replace the close button with this target region, since it can't be used while dragging anyway.

joaormatos on 11 Jul 2016

If you collapse the tree you are trying to move, it becomes much easier to drop it onto another tab.

And if you still find that solitary tab bouncing around and not letting you drop another tree onto it,
then "new tab" on that solitary tab - so that it has a child, then drop the tree into it.

I also tend to keep those new tabs around, as last tab markers.
e.g.

file:///C:/Admin/HTML/FF/titleSet.html?title="◊ /"&desc="FOO"

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<title id="title">>&nbsp;TITLE</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="desc">&nbsp;</div>
<script>
javascript
function processUser()
    {
    var addr = document.location.href;
    var args = Object;
    var i = 0;
    while(addr!=undefined && (args = addr.match(/[\?\&]([a-z]+)=%22(.*?)%22(.*)?/)) != null)
        {
        if(document.getElementById(args[1]) != null && ((addr=args[3]) || true )) 
            document.getElementById(args[1]).innerHTML = decodeURIComponent(args[2]);
        }
    var desc=document.querySelector("#desc");
    if(desc.innerHTML == "&nbsp;")
        desc.innerHTML = document.title;
     }
     (processUser());
</script>
</body>
</html>

CrashNBurn71 on 1 Sep 2016

@HighCommander4 that shows the struggle perfectly. It's pretty much always like this for me.

rstarkov on 12 Sep 2016

It's much easier to drop open trees on even single tabs now with the most recent Tree Style Tab (0.18.2016091200a011251), and the version released just prior to that as well.

CrashNBurn71 on 13 Sep 2016

to me the issue is that tab (Google’s in @HighCommander’s animation) dangling around whenever one tries to hover it. getting the cursor at the right place in these conditions is impossible. a much more workable interface would be something in the fashion of any file explorer: depending on the position of the cursor, a thick rule appears between two tabs to say “insert here”, or the tab hovered is highlighted to say “insert in there”; tabs do not move.

plus, the nice transition effects in general —including stuff like transparency & automatic hiding in fullscreen— slow down everything, for no use, especially with many tabs open (the very reason why i use Tree Style Tab…).

Maelan on 15 Jan 2017

Hi there,
we need to reanimate this ticket, as the issue has new aspects with the new version and FF version 57:
Dragged tabs are hidden as "collapsed tabs", although the parent tab is not in the collapse mode.
See video:
tab-dragging.zip