Better tab design

[priyanshu16095]

JabRef can make better use of space in the library tab. It can show the number of entries in the library. This behavior is very common, similar to how GitHub shows the number of issues or pull requests in its tabs.

The tab should display the total number of entries in the library. If the user selects specific entries, it should instead show the number of selected entries.

Describe the solution you'd like

A new tab design should be implemented for better UI and UX. It should display:

1. A document icon on the right side and a different icon for each library type

   • If mode == BibTeX → show the BibTeX icon [like badge BTX]
   • If mode == BibLaTeX → show the BibLaTeX icon [like badge BLX]

2. The total number of entries on the left side of close icon. [If the Groups sidebar is open, it should be turned off.]

3. Users can set custom icons for their libraries, for example, a Math library, a Chemistry library, a Java library, and more.

4. Like every feature, it should be toggleable from Preferences.

What impact will it have?

1. Better context awareness.

2. Faster workflow
   Seeing the number of selected entries directly in the tab helps users quickly confirm operations such as exporting, deleting, or editing multiple references.

3. Alignment with modern UI patterns.

4. Improved visual organisation by having custom icons for a library.

If the status bar feature request gets approved, many of the things will be included there, but things like custom icons will still be used.

[calixtus]

Hi, thanks for your suggestions for improvements.

Total number of entries badge sounds interesting to me. Maybe you could produce a mwe with the javafx reproducer if this is possible currently with javafx.

Bibtex/biblatex-mode is imho superfluous as there is no real use case for constantly switching between both and having to know that on first sight. --> to much information produces mental overload

Custom icons for libraries might be a nice to have, but i doubt that this is suitable for our target audience. I assume most of our users are effectifly working in just one field of science and use one main library and some more libraries created from a subset of the main library filtered for a specific paper they write. So maintenance effort should be considered here.

[koppor]

In general: Why proposing new (probably easy to implement) features instead of diving into the code and fixing some issues? As of today, we have 63 high-priority issues: Prioritization

[priyanshu16095]

@koppor Thank you for pointing out. I will shift my focus to high priority issues. I thought of starting with good first issues, and while exploring JabRef, a few ideas came to my mind that seemed small and feasable, so I thought of proposing them. I have fixed ian ssue #8732 today and have started working on a feature to “improve the search interface.”