If you have a few tabs open then more often than not you get this little symbol on the right end of the tab bar similar to this: "+3" The problem is that you have no way of guessing which files are not showing up on the tabs. If you click the "+3" then the ordering is something different than what you see on the tab bar so the guess is again thwarted. I hate this 'feature' its ill conceived and serves no real purpose. Can we PLEASE dummp this paradigm and just use multi-row tabs? So much simpler!
...Or a scrolling tab bar, or tabs that progressively become smaller, or something else, I agree.
The problem is that a large number of files is always hard to access with a tabbar. That is why Kate always had (and still has) the vertical Documents sidebar, listing all documents. If you need quick access to all files, you should try using the quick open feature through the shortcut CTRL+ALT+O, then type part of the file you want to open, and select the file with cursors, and press enter. This is extremely fast and scales if you get used to this workflow. I agree that the tabbar will not solve your problem in your case, if you do not use the keyboard for navigation. Then again, even if we change it to your liking, then it is just a matter of +N open files and you will have the issue again... That said, we are of course also open for patches that improve Kate. So if you have suggestions, best send patches :-)
*** Bug 380109 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 384644 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 384645 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
It's worth looking into what other popular software does with large numbers of tabs. The most prominent examples would be web browsers. - Firefox shortens the tabs down to a certain minimum tab witdh, then makes the whole tab bar scrollable (without a horizontal scrollbar, though) - Chromium/Chrome continuously shortens the tabs so you can fit as many as you want on the tab bar (until you realize the madness of your 45-tab web browser window :) ) If we switched to using the standard Qt tab widget, we would automatically inherit a variation of the latter behavior (see Bug 385520).
A Multi-Row tab bar would be sweet. Please consider it. The other options are not as user friendly. Note there is an addon for firefox that provides multi-row tab bar and another that provides multi-row bookmarks - both are quite popular. What does that say about firefox's current method of handling multiple pages/bookmarks? "The problem is that a large number of files is always hard to access with a tabbar." If its because the tabs shrink in width - then yes, I would agree, a multi-row tab bar solves this problem. dropping filenames off the tab bar into a list (as done currently) also doesn't help things. The Ctrl-Alt-O + typing part of a filename thing is unwieldy compared to a multi-row tab bar. Until you have worked using a multi-row tab bar you just can not appreciate how user friendly it is, its also a time saver. Consider what its like to work in Kate with say 4 files open, the tabs work nicely right? I'm just asking to have this extended a bit and to say that you will just hit this issue again as the number of files goes up is a non-starter. There is a normal intuitive usage pattern that does not extend indefinitely and most people know that at some point you need to close some files but I'd hazard a guess and say that having 10-15 or so files open at once isn't unreasonable, but at some point no matter how user friendly things are you are overwhelmed and its time to close some stuff and I think that limit isn't too much above 25 or so. For sure no one in their right mind wants to have 5-100 or more files open, its just not manageable. I don't care if the multi-row-tab-bar has a 3 row limit and a max tab count of say 16-20. That's completely reasonable and it helps people work. Squishing tabs to the point they are unreadable means the tabs have lost there purpose and does not help people work. As for contributing patches, sure, if your a programmer. Not everyone is. I have not looked at Kate code but the tab bar is already there, is it really a lot of work to make it multi-row? Maybe it is, I'm asking not commenting.
Multi-row tabs would be good, however I recently found that Documents side bar is really useful when many files are opened. Another way to switch between opened files is to use quick open. Each opened file is displayed in bold font and you can type part of the word or characters to narrow the file list. I also assigned a keyboard shortcut to show Quick Open quickly without leaving my fingers from keyboard, which is much efficient and useful for me.
I don't think we shall change the behavior. We have already plenty of ways to switch between documents. 1) For the last accessed X documents the tab bar at the top. 2) The very space efficient document list/tree at the side. 3) In addition there is quick open. (that allows you useful search for stuff, too) Just because you prefer multi-line or shrinking tabs, that doesn't make them superior to e.g. the document list, which is a lot more space efficient given you normally have some XX:Y screen aspect ratio.