MacOS Sierra - Tab Bar showing in Stack and IDE windows?

[Paul Hibbert]

I’ve just recently started seeing the MacOS Sierra Tab Bar showing up in the LC IDE and stack windows. I don’t know when it started happening, maybe the last OS update, but it’s now it’s starting to cause some problems.

Very occasionally I would see the menu item ‘Show Tab Bar’ with the shortcut shift-cmd-T in the ‘View’ menu, but more recently I haven’t seen the menu item! It’s getting to be pretty frustrating, when the menu item is not there the shortcut doesn’t work for any window except the project browser.

Some of the time this feels like a really useful feature, I can added the Project Browser, Script Editor and Dictionary into one window, so that makes it really easy to switch between the tabs and results in a much tidier screen space.

The problem I’m having now is when opening a new or previously saved stack, it shows a tab bar if the stack is resizable, but not if the stack is a fixed size. The odd thing is the tab bar eats into the stack size, so if I create a new default stack the size would normally be 400 x 400 px, but now it’s 400px W and 377px H. If I turn off ‘Resizable’ the inspector shows 400px H, now if I turn ‘Resizable’ back on the inspector still shows 400px H, but now I have a tab bar showing within the 400px so I end up with just 377px of useable stack height.

This happens in LC7 onwards, LC5.5.5 is unaffected.

Until just a few moments ago, I couldn’t figure out how to control the problem, but I’ve just found that the Project Browser window is the key. If I open the Project Browser the shortcut seems to work provided I don’t go to the View Menu first, opening any other widows including stack windows just follow whatever setting is applied to the PB window, with the exception of fixed size stack windows.

This doesn’t seem like a LC bug, but more a change in the OS that LC needs to address somehow, so before I fill in a bug report or feature enhancement request, I’m curious if anybody else is seeing the Tab Bar in the IDE windows on MacOS Sierra? Or better still, does anybody know a way to control or disable the feature?

Paul
paul at livecode.org

MacOS Sierra 10.12.3 - iMac with Eizo monitor