Hah! A friend just shared this with me, I'm Maurice the original author, long time anonymous hn lurker. This was a labor of love, I still remember the sheer exhilaration when I made my first sale!
I'm surprised no one has mentioned BeOS / Haiku who's windows titlebars Tab automatically across all programs.<p><a href="https://discuss.haiku-os.org/uploads/default/original/1X/abb75dd3c93f390c661cbad78427fb6d3e469f63.gif" rel="nofollow">https://discuss.haiku-os.org/uploads/default/original/1X/abb...</a>
Awesome. Microsoft themselves had planned this feature for some time, but abandoned it for some reason. Instead they were probably focusing their efforts on making it harder to prevent automatic updates.
In 1993, the Windows Taskbar actually began life as tabs across the top of the screen:<p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com.au/history-of-the-windows-start-button-2015-7" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com.au/history-of-the-windows-st...</a>
Self-ad: Stack WM (for Windows 10). Also shows tabs for windows, but works more like a tiling WM.<p><a href="https://losttech.software/stack-whatsnew-2.0.html" rel="nofollow">https://losttech.software/stack-whatsnew-2.0.html</a>
Not free (or 'free') but there is a commercial app that does this very well indeed - Stardock Groupy. It was bundled in with something else I bought years ago and I just leave it running as it's quite handy.<p><a href="https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/</a>
My go-to file explorer power tool on Windows is Q-dir [1]. It supports tabbing among other useful features.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Freeware/Q-Dir" rel="nofollow">http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Freeware/Q-Dir</a>
KDE Plasma also had this many years ago (before Windows' Sets), but they ended up removing it in Plasma 5.<p>(there is a bug report about it:
<a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343690" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343690</a><p>)
VS2019 but Windows 7?<p>A similar app is TidyTabs: <a href="https://www.nurgo-software.com/products/tidytabs" rel="nofollow">https://www.nurgo-software.com/products/tidytabs</a><p>Has anyone tried it? It's not open source, but "free for personal use".
For anyone else wanting to, this might be fairly easy to do in Qt with QWindow::fromWinId and then using a tab widget. I have recently done similar w/ a POC to embed FF into a tabbed UI on Windows[0] when researching making a new browser backed by FF instead of Chromium (granted I used Go to test out their Qt binding at the time).<p>0 - <a href="https://github.com/cretz/ffembedpoc" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cretz/ffembedpoc</a>
Stardock Groupy is a commercial supported utility that does the same thing, IIRC released during the long period when Microsoft was teasing Windows 10 Sets.<p><a href="https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/</a><p>I think Microsoft must have abandoned sets when they moved to Edgium; their engineers were somehow under the impression that Sets was 100% dependent on Edge, and I think they must have been planning the feature as a cudgel against other browsers. IDK, I wish the Windows PMs were like 40% less user hostile and didn’t treat us like children to be manipulated.<p>Tldr, Groupy is pretty cool and at least appears to fit in with the windows 10 desktop better than the open source utility, for a price.