Manage and customize Visual Studio tabs with Tabs Studio add-in

By Sergey Vlasov on Dec 17 2010

With Tabs Studio the user is able to better manage all open documents in Visual Studio, grouped and organized most efficiently. This Visual Studio add-in supports the latest VS versions and will especially come handy when you open many tabs at once.

0
- Like
- Love It
- Awesome
- Interesting
- It's Okay
- Thumbs Down
9.4k
0

Getting started

Tabs Studio supports Visual Studio 2005/2008 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (excluding express editions). After Tabs Studio installation you get multiple rows tab bar with relevant tabs grouped together. You will never need to search for an open document any more. Figure 1 demonstrates tabs after opening an MFC project in Visual Studio 2008.

Figure 1. Tabs Studio in Visual Studio 2008

h and cpp tabs are automatically grouped together for this C++ project. For C#, VB, Web and other projects documents with other relevant extensions are grouped as you can see in Figure 2. This technique saves lots of time when switching between open documents.

Figure 2. Tab grouping

Customization

Powerful visual customization support offered by Tabs Studio allows you to theme tabs according to your personal coding preferences. Tabs Studio is a WPF add-in and use XAML for styling. Font, color, position, visibility and animation of each tab element can be customized. For example, Figure 3 demonstrates Visual Studio 2010 like theme.

Figure 3. Tabs Studio in Visual Studio 2010

You control when and how to show a close tab button, whether to color document and non-document tabs differently, whether to remove path from tab name and can even replace file modification status from asterisk to red tab text color.

Extras

Tabs Studio offers several additional productivity improvements such as ability to quickly open corresponding file from tab context menu, switch between corresponding files using a keyboard shortcut and highlight the previously selected tab.

Figure 4. Open corresponding file command in tab context menu

Experimental support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 Management Studio IDE is available. Offering the same multiple rows of tabs and tab grouping as in Visual Studio IDE.

Figure 5. Tabs Studio in SSMS 2008

Extensibility

Tabs Studio supports custom .NET add-ins that can further extend Tabs Studio functionality and interact with the Visual Studio shell. Several sample add-ins with full source code are already available. For example, Sorter add-in sorts tabs in alphabetical order. You can see this additional functionality shortly described in the Description column in Tabs Studio Add-in Manager window for installed add-ins in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Tabs Studio Add-in Manager

Try it for yourself

You can download fully functional 30 day trial from Tabs Studio add-in official site. Personal lifetime Tabs Studio license costs $34.