Fitt's Law violated in v1.129

[fweth]

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes

• VS Code Version: 1.129.0-1783660435
• OS Version: Ubuntu 26.04 (X11)

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open a few files.
2. Try to select a tab by slamming the mouse into the top edge oft the screen and clicking. It won't work, because the newly designed tab strip has the tabs as floating buttons, with hitboxes not extending to the top corner of the app. See attached video here: https://imgur.com/a/IwQ1sNp

[gjsjohnmurray]

Sounds like you're referring to the experimental Modern UI which is enabled by this setting:

"workbench.experimental.modernUI": true

[gjsjohnmurray]

I can't view the video you linked to:

/gifPlease

[vs-code-engineering]

Thanks for reporting this issue! Unfortunately, it's hard for us to understand what issue you're seeing. Please help us out by providing a screen recording showing exactly what isn't working as expected. While we can work with most standard formats, .gif files are preferred as they are displayed inline on GitHub. You may find https://gifcap.dev helpful as a browser-based gif recording tool.

If the issue depends on keyboard input, you can help us by enabling screencast mode for the recording (Developer: Toggle Screencast Mode in the command palette). Lastly, please attach this file via the GitHub web interface as emailed responses will strip files out from the issue.

Happy coding!

[lppedd]

I'll attach the video while I'm here.

Xk9QgZo.mp4

I do agree with the OP that the new design requires better click precision, which is a bit of a PITA sometimes.

[lppedd]

Generally speaking I'm not sure what's going on with all IDEs moving to floating boxes as tabs. They're not tabs anymore in their true meaning.

Maybe a designer can explain the choice because I can't.

[fweth]

Thank you Ippedd for embedding the video, I didn't know this was possible. And I don't have workbench.experimental.modernUI in my user settings, but I'm on the latest insiders branch, could be that they activated it there before the official rollout or maybe I'm in some control group?

[lppedd]

@fweth yes, you might have Microsoft experiments enabled. #324949
AFAIU, that allows MS to remotely activate experimental settings for group of users.

You can turn experiments off with:

"workbench.enableExperiments": false

[fweth]

@lppedd I think the floating boxes as tabs are just a design trend, but usually you can fit them well with Fitt's Law, by making sure the padding is part of the button and not part of the container. What seems to happen here, is that additionally to the floating buttons there are floating "zones", so there is a rounded 1-px border around the editor zone including the editor tabs, and I think this is exactly the perpetrator, because it feels like when I move the mouse just one pixel below the edge, I can already click a tab, even when the mouse still doesn't hover over the visual button, as can be seen in the video. This floating zone design is indeed a bit difficult to fit with Fitt's Law, might want to invisibly extend the buttons over the border with negative margin top or use outline with negative offset for the zone border or something.