A few months ago we released a Temporary Tabs feature to Beta. You had some feedback, and we listened! We’ve made a bunch of improvements and are now ready to release Temporary Tabs into the wilds of production. Keep reading for an update on latest behavior!
Benefits
The core value of Temporary Tabs is eliminating time spent searching for the right script tab. It does this by decluttering the tab bar (especially when scanning through multiple Scripts).
When opened from any of the following, Scripts will open in “Preview” mode by default (indicated through the italics in the Script name):
Quick Open
Output Window
Find All
Breakpoints Widget
Call Stack Widget
Watch Widget
Tabs can be made permanent in any of the following ways:
Double-clicking on the tab header
Right-clicking on the tab and select “Dock Tab”
Editing the Script
The All-Important Defaults
Temporary Tabs has two settings under the Script Editor section of Studio Settings:
Enable Temporary Script Tabs (default ON) - opens scripts in a temporary tab when single-clicked from any of the entry points listed above
Enable Temporary Script Tabs in Explorer (default OFF) - only active if Enable Temporary Script Tabs is ON. Opens scripts in a temporary tab when single-clicked from the Explorer.
Hotkeys
We also wanted to highlight some hotkeys that make it easier to interact with tabs:
Closing a tab: Ctrl+W for Windows and Cmd+W for Mac
Reopening previous tab: Ctrl+Shift+t for Windows and Cmd+Shift+t for Mac
Cycling between tabs based on history: Ctrl+tab for Windows and Ctrl+Space for Mac
Next Stop: Rollout!
We are gradually rolling out this functionality, starting with a 10% rollout today. If all goes well, this percentage will increase to 100% over the next week or so.
The concept of this update seems to have some nice utility, however would it be possible to have different textcolors or something, or some kind of sorting to this so maybe it will sort by script size, and whatnot and modulescripts will appear differently on here?
Anyone who figures out how to make this update useful in their workflow please feel free to pm or ping me how/why. This seemed cool to me in concept at first but I found it to be an aggravating feature to have enabled after using it, especially temp. tabs for Explorer. Anywho, thanks for making these features optional
In my opinion, temporary tabs can be useful depending on personal preference, but should absolutely be an option.
The real issue Roblox should be focusing on in my opinion is that each tab takes up too much space on the top bar - especially in team create for people with long names like me. When it says (bigcrazycarboy editing) at the end of the tab. That makes the name much longer and prevents more tabs from fitting. Just look at how much space is wasted just because of long titles!
This is great! But could we get some button we can click to disable this feature? When I’m bug fixing it could be quite difficult to find the script if it was named the same as a lot of other scripts. Anyway! TYSM.
Whilst this feature is probably well wanted by some to most developers as it may have some benefits, this should be an option for people who have personal preferences.
Additionally, it doesn’t really address the issue of certain scripts taking up too much space on the tabs because they either:
Have a long name
Are disabled because of the [Disabled] prefix
Are being edited by someone
I believe that there should be a bit of focus on reducing the amount of space each script can take as to help allow for more scripts to be visible without needing to scroll to the left or to the right. And I have a few ideas as to how that can be done:
For scripts with long names, they could be truncated until they are clicked on. Say for example there’s a script called “MarketPlaceServiceHandler”, it should be truncated to “MarketPlace…” when not in focus and should show the full name when you focus on it. This feature should probably be the least to worry about since not a lot of people create scripts with a lot of characters in their name or at least make this into a customizable feature for developers to set the amount of characters for a script tab
For Scripts that are disabled, I think it’s better if they have their icon greyed out like how it is in the explorer rather than prefixing it with “[Disabled]”. Not only does it simply the tab of that script, but it’s also consistent with how a disabled script is usually displayed
For scripts that are being edited, what would be better is to have an icon on the bottom right of the script icon to indicate it’s being edited by someone, and when you focus on the script being edited, it will show near the name of the script who is editing it. For example, a script called “SwordScript” is being edited, you click on it and it changes to “SwordScript (EmbatTheHybrid Editing)”. A method like this can still show developers that someone is editing a script but without he need to shove the editor in their face. Optionally, you could also put this icon on currently edited scripts in the explorer as well so whoever doesn’t have that script open will still be able to know that someone is editing it without having to open it.
Roblox is heading towards a step in the right direction by creating temporary tabs, but things still need to be done to improve the visibility and clarity of tabs
I have had the beta feature on for quite a while. I have found that there are a lot of subtle features built into this which make sense and make it far less annoying to use, in fact, this is why I have been using it, its actually a time saver in many cases.
Here is a few you might not expect to be able to do:
Double clicking on tabs (in the tab view itself) that are temporary opens them fully
In global find (Ctrl+Shift+F) you can double click on find results to fully open them
Double clicking on print results opens tabs fully
I am a huge fan of being able to hit Ctrl+W, Ctrl+Shift+T, and Ctrl+Tab/Ctrl+Shift+Tab as well, its extremely useful and I am used to doing this in Chrome already.
The one thing I wish we could do is Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, etc to select tabs, if that’s not already a thing, because, that would allow me to order my tabs and be able to switch to the exact script I want super quickly.
