I would like the community's thoughts on the idea of document tabs for Inkscape. They would be in Inkscape much as we see them in sK1, Firefox, etc.



I don't know which would be easier on the system: running 2, 3 or more copies of Inkscape in order to work cross-document, or having each document open within one instance of Inkscape.

I'm tinking about this just today... I found it's discussed on launchpad.
I really would like to se this feature, and even tabbed dialogs a la GIMP (especially in single window mode), so the two programs will be more similar (dreaming of an open creative suite!)
as per the single instance issue, maybe it could be done as in Chrome (one process per page), but it will be more complex to code..

My only problem with the idea is that some heavy vectors can crash inkscape.
When you work on several files at the same time
-for an example, copying an important part out of a large messy svg-,
if all were only on a new tab, a freeze could crash the others as well.
In my opinion if inkscape would perform fluently, multiple tabs could make working more organised, which would be good.

Lazur URH wrote:My only problem with the idea is that some heavy vectors can crash inkscape.
When you work on several files at the same time
-for an example, copying an important part out of a large messy svg-,
if all were only on a new tab, a freeze could crash the others as well.
In my opinion if inkscape would perform fluently, multiple tabs could make working more organised, which would be good.

I agree. Although tabs would be nice for convenience, I'm not so sure it would be the best solution since as pointed out, Inkscape tends to crash with large messy svg files (and sometimes with certain filters and/or an undo of a filter). I often work on multiple documents or have multiple documents open to copy/paste certain elements from one Document to another especially when working with gradients (I have several gradient swatches Ive made since I learned that having tons of gradients to work with in Inkscape makes the files extremely large unless you Vacuum them out before saving). I'm afraid that if Inkscape Docs were opened in Tabs a crash would crash all tabs so you would lose all your work (if you don't have autosave on) and you'd have to open up each Doc again to get back to work.

As is, I can have multiple instances of Inkscape open and it very rarely will crash more than one instance at a time (though I have had Inkscape freeze up and completely crash all open Inkscape Docs a few times). So if Tabbing was supported, I'd still want to be able to open multiple instances as well and have the best of BOTH worlds.

Pilosopong Tasyo wrote:

BobSongs wrote:I don't know which would be easier on the system: running 2, 3 or more copies of Inkscape in order to work cross-document, or having each document open within one instance of Inkscape.

I checked with System Monitor and it looks like only one instance of Inkscape is running across multiple documents. Additional RAM gets allocated on demand (creating objects, opening new/existing drawings, etc.). So based on this observation, I don't think multiple-tabs versus multiple-windows would make a huge difference on system resources. YMMV, of course.

That said, tabs would be nice. It's a convenience, and it will surely lessen window clutter when doing edits on multiple drawings.

I've just cecked on my mac (still 0.48.2) and I have only one "inkscape-bin" with multiple windows opened (now I have 4 windows and 3 threads).
I didn't experienced crashes with multiple files opened (usually I work on a sigle file at a time) but I assume every window would close if it happens, so the tabbed document wouldn't introduce any problem.