Rather than having to move mouse to far left and far right and mash repeatedly on the mouse button to scroll through the flows tab, I think it would be intuitive to allow mouse wheel scrolling through them. (Scroll down moves to the right side and scroll up moves left.)
Edit to add: using a laptop touchpad, I can use a two-finger gesture left and right which pans the view across to achieve this, but when working with a mouse it's not possible.
I think if the mouse is hovering over the tab bar itself, it would not be unreasonable to scroll the tabs rather than the window. That would be more consistent with other apps that have long tab bars.
In my case (Win/Chrome) and I suspect universally, using the mouse wheel when mouse is over the flows bar does not scroll the main window. It just does nothing. Hence seems like a useful addition.
There is also the question of exactly what the scroll wheel should do when hovered over the tabs. In Chrome on Ubuntu with it hovered over the browser tabs it scrolls the focus along, but with Waterfox browser it scrolls the tabs but does not change the focus (which is much quicker of course).
I was thinking that it would scroll the tabs without changing focus. This way it replicates the function of the existing navigation buttons each end of the tab bar. Also as you say it's quicker to scroll to the tab then click it, and invariably you never usually need to visit tabs in sequential order, but instead you need random access...
I think that would be the most wanted action as it would be trivial to click on a wanted tab
I just tested to see what happens in my Notepad++ editor and it just scrolls the tab without changing focus.
If I was programming this facility into a browser ,that shows all the tabs at the same time, then I'd program it to change focus but not for things like NR when all the tabs aren't visible
Ah, Chrome shows all the browser tabs at once, I had not realised that, but Waterfox doesn't, it allows tabs to disappear off the edges like node-red does.
If you prefer to "break mode" (lose focus on what you are doing) then you can click the list flows button instead
I (like many programmers) tend to stay on the keyboard/avoid the mouse as much as possible (it is more economical to learn shortcuts than break focus (mode) finding the mouse & moving it).
The shortcut muscle memory doesn't take long to develop but you have to make a little effort up front.
I'm a drag and drop block programmer (Node-Red, Scratch, Snap! etc) so I'm glued to the mouse and only use the keyboard when I have to - mainly to reply on forums
I'm half-way, I rely heavily on keyboard shortcuts but have limited brainspace to learn every shortcut for every application I use (Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Fusion 360, Gmail, Outlook 365)...
I have the commitment to learn shortcuts for things I do VERY often:
Ctrl-D = Deploy
Ctrl-Alt-L = Clear debug
plus all the other generic shortcuts that work with most apps like Ctrl-F for find. But that's about it!
Ctrl D is delete in windows, I stay clear of this one, I have a 4k display and I work with multiple spaces at the same time. losing focus of NodeRED with Crtl D can give you heart attack
I'm happy to look at this, but if anyone wanted to dip their toe into the water, it'll be a question of adding a handler for the wheel event somewhere around here:
A fussy request if anyone can do this: can it be some kind of smooth scroll?
I don’t mean “inertia” scrolling with acceleration, just a pixel-level scroll instead of shifting the tabs left or right by a whole tab’s width.