Why are there so many different tab styles in different places?

Brainstorm
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1

There was an initiative by Niccolo Venerandi back in plasma 5 to unify tab styles in KDE (plasma, gear, etc). Ironically it resulted in the creation of even more tab styles. Currently there are at least:

  • Tabs on the left side of DigiKam and bottom of Kate (no focus indicator line, surrounded by rectangle)
  • Tabs in Dolphin (usual breeze/windows tab style with focus indicator lines on top)
  • Tabs in the settings window of Dolphin (new immutable tab style with focus indicator lines on top)
  • Tabs in the bottom bar of KClock (focus is indicated by accent color in background)
  • Tabs in plasmoids (focus indicator on bottom)
  • Tabs in qqc2-breeze style (similar to the new immutable tabs but qml)
  • Custom tab widgets in amarok

Is there any plan to at least make these look similar?

2 Likes
2

ah yes, one of the biggest KDE problems, design consistency. It all starts from the part that we have many different UI frameworks and different toolkits to build apps, too many. Each one has different ways of implementing different things and then developers they themselves also create new ways to design stuff because KDE doesn’t really enforce anything, which is good, but ends up becoming a mess on some places. I think the KDE team should really focus on ditching less used frameworks and try to focus on one or two at most, and focus on improving those, and maybe enforce a few little things like those damn tab styles.