Colloquy: Breaking tabs into windows - back and forth

August 1, 2008 @ 22:49

I use Colloquy at work, a simple IRC client written in Cocoa that runs under Mac OS X 10.4 and higher. Although it has a few quirks, it works well enough for me to use it in my everyday communication with my teammates (I’m always interested in alternatives though - if you have an ace up your sleeve, please tell me so by leaving a comment).

As I’m found of tabbed user interfaces, I have setup Colloquy to show a tab for every room and private conversation I’m currently in. This works just like tabs in Safari; you can rearrange any tab by dragging it to a new position relative the other tabs, or breaking a single tab loose from the current window, letting it turn into it’s own window. So far so good… but what if you wanted to take a window with a single conversation and turn it into a tab in another window with existing tabs? Guess what - this works just in Safari too - except that every window that is created by you dragging an existing tab out of its window won’t show the tab bar by default (hence not displaying any area that will let you drag it into another window’s tab bar).

It turns out there’s an easy solution to this problem; if you ever want to take a window with a single conversation and make it a tab in another window, just tell Colloquy to show the tab bar for the current window. This is easily done through the main menu (View / Show Tab Bar), or through the designated keyboard shortcut, Command + Shift + T. Once it is displayed, just grab the tab and drag it to whatever other window you want and, tada, it turns into a tab within that window.

Not exactly rocket science, but it might help someone who accidently turned a tab into a separate window (and got stuck there, not knowing how to get it back).