I’m not sure how this happened, but suddenly I have Sierra tabs in DT. I must have hit some key that activated this undocumented (and apparently unsupported) feature. After playing around with it for a bit, I’ve concluded that Sierra tabs and DT is a match made in Heaven. It’s hugely beneficial in that it allows you to have multiple views of your database open simultaneously, all within the same window. It’s far superior to DT’s native tabs feature, which is poorly implemented and confusing. There are several threads in this forum discussing the problems with DT’s native tabs.
The difference between DT’s native tabs and Sierra tabs is that a Sierra tab is essentially an entirely separate and independent DT window, encapsulated within the Sierra tab interface. Thus, you can have multiple databases open, or the same database open in multiple tabs, each displaying a different location within the database hierarchy. In my opinion, this is far more powerful and flexible than DT’s native tab feature, which opens tabs within the document pane and all tabs share the same main database view. It’s also a lot better than DT’s standard behavior of opening an entirely separate window for each database view. Imagine, in this day and age, using a web browser that doesn’t support tabs and opens each web page in its own window. You’d up with a mess of windows, which you’d have to manage from the dock icon or the Windows menu.
I’m wondering (hoping), the developers will consider officially supporting Sierra tabs within DT. At this point, it works very well, though I have no idea how I activated it and I’m afraid to close DT, for fear of losing it. The only thing it needs now are the menu options to manage tabs, merge windows, etc… and a “New Tab” function. These are normally available by default in third party applications, except for applications that do their own window management, which I guess DT does. By the way, adding support for Sierra tabs would not conflict with DT’s native tabs. The native tabs may still be useful to some people, but for my purposes, the Sierra tabs are a lot more useful.
