Tabbed Text

Stack several streams into one window and let the tab badges tell you which one moved.

What it’s for

Giving every stream its own window works right up until you run out of screen. Speech, thoughts, whispers, group chat, deaths, logons — six windows down a 40-column side bar leaves nothing for the game itself, and most of them sit empty most of the time anyway.

A tabbed text window puts them in one frame with a tab strip. You read one tab at a time, and the other tabs mark themselves unread when something lands. That’s the real payoff: you stop paying screen rent for streams that are quiet, without going blind to them. A whisper arrives while you’re watching combat, the Whispers tab lights up, and you click over when the swing is done.

Tabs you’d rather not be nagged about — a chatty group channel, a logon feed — can be set Quiet, so they still collect text but never mark themselves unread.

Set it up

1. Create the window.

Click Windows in the top toolbar, then ➕ Custom window… ▸ Tabbed text.

2. Open the Tab Editor.

Right-click the new window and choose Edit tabs… from the window’s own section. This opens the Tab Editor, a separate panel rather than an inline menu fold.

⚠️ The Tab Editor is Save-buffered — the rest of the right-click menu is not. Everywhere else in a window’s menu your change applies the instant you make it. Here, nothing takes effect until you click Save. Closing the panel without saving discards your edits.

3. Add your tabs.

Two routes, and they work together:

The Known streams checklist. Tick a stream to give it its own tab, named for the stream. Untick it to remove it from every tab. This is the fast way to build a window from scratch. The list covers every stream the client knows about — the well-known ones plus anything your sessions have ever declared — not only what has arrived today.
The grid. One row per tab: Name, Streams, Quiet, TS, reorder, Remove. Use it to rename a tab, put several streams on one tab, or set the order. The + beside a row’s Streams field lists streams seen this session and appends one to that tab.

Reorder with the ▲ and ▼ buttons on a row — the tab strip follows the grid’s order.

📷 screenshot pending

The Tab Editor: the grid of Name / Streams / Quiet / TS rows with reorder and Remove, the Known streams checklist below, and Add tab and Save.

4. Save.

Click Save. Two rules are enforced: a tabbed window needs at least one tab, and every tab needs a name — you’ll get a message rather than a silent failure if either is broken.

→ Expected result: the tab strip redraws with your tabs in order, and the next line on any subscribed stream lands on its tab, badging that tab unread if it isn’t the one you’re reading.

1. Place the window.

.addwindow comms tabbedtext 80 0 40 20

<name> is a free label; x is the column and y the row. .addwindow takes 1 argument or 6-plus — never 2 to 5; with no arguments it opens a picker instead.

2. Edit the tabs.

Type .editwindow comms, move to the tab list, and work it with the keys shown in the footer:

[A: Add]─[E: Edit]─[Del: Delete]─[Shift+↑/↓: Re-order]─[Esc: Back]

A adds a tab and E edits the selected one, both opening a small form with four fields in order: Name, Streams, Timestamps, Ignore activity. Tab and Shift+Tab move between fields.

On the Streams field, press Ctrl+P for a picker of streams seen this session — footer [Enter: Add stream]─[Esc: Back]. It stays open after each add, so you can put several streams on one tab in a row.

Press Ctrl+S to save the window, or Esc to cancel.

📷 screenshot pending

The TUI window editor's tab list for a tabbedtext window, footer reading [A: Add]─[E: Edit]─[Del: Delete]─[Shift+↑/↓: Re-order]─[Esc: Back].

→ Expected result: the tab strip shows your tabs in the order you set, and a tab marks itself unread when text arrives on it while you’re reading another.

Common setups

A communication hub

One window carrying every conversational channel, with the noisy one muted.

Make a Tabbed text window and open Edit tabs…. Build four rows:

Name	Streams	Quiet	TS
Speech	`speech`		✓
Thoughts	`thoughts`		✓
Whispers	`whisper`		✓
Group	`group`	✓

Timestamps on the three you’ll read back through; Quiet on Group so a busy party channel doesn’t badge the window every few seconds. Click Save.

You’ll see: one window where four used to go, with Whispers badging itself the moment someone whispers to you — and Group collecting quietly, unread mark never lighting.

An activity feed for a hunting screen

Combat, deaths, and arrivals in one 40-column pane so your side bar keeps room for targets and a compass.

Tabs: Combat on combat, Deaths on death, and Arrivals on logons with Quiet ticked — you want to be able to check who walked in without being pulled away from a fight every time somebody logs on.

In the TUI, that’s .addwindow activity tabbedtext 80 0 40 12, then .editwindow activity and A three times.

You’ll see: your fight in the front tab, a Deaths tab that badges when something dies near you, and an Arrivals tab that fills silently until you go looking.

Tips & gotchas

⚠️ The Tab Editor is Save-buffered; the rest of the window menu applies live. This is the one place in the GUI’s per-window settings where your changes are not already in effect. If tab edits “didn’t take,” you closed the panel without clicking Save.

Unticking a stream in Known streams removes it from every tab, not just the one you’re looking at. If that untick leaves a tab with no streams, the tab goes away. Tabs that were already empty — a row you just added and haven’t filled — are left alone. Remove a stream from one tab only by editing that row’s Streams field instead.

The two stream pickers in the Tab Editor are different lists. The Known streams checklist is the full universe the client knows about. The per-row + offers only streams seen this session. A stream you expect that hasn’t fired yet appears in the checklist but not in the + menu.

Quiet is per tab, and it’s about the unread mark, not the text. A Quiet tab still receives and buffers everything; it just never badges. That’s the setting you want for a channel you check on purpose rather than react to.

buffer_size on a tabbed window is per tab, not shared across the window, and it defaults to 10,000 lines.

⚠️ Word wrap on a tabbed window is GUI-only. For a plain text window, Appearance ▸ Text ▸ Word wrap writes to the shared layout definition and travels to the TUI. A tabbed window has no wordwrap field, so the setting is remembered per GUI tab and does not reach layout.toml or the terminal.

Three tab-switching actions exist, and none has a default key. Next Tab, Previous Tab, and Next Unread Tab live under the Tabs category in the keybinds editor. Bind Next Unread Tab if you like — it jumps straight to whatever just badged, which is the whole point of the badges.

A subscribed tab outranks stream routing. A tab that lists a stream receives it regardless of any [streams.routes] entry; routes only decide where unsubscribed streams go. Check effective destinations in the Streams panel — Editors ▸ Streams & Custom Windows, or .streams.

⚠️ In the Terminal (TUI), Ctrl+C copies your selection — it does not quit. In the Desktop GUI the same combination quits. Leave the TUI with .quit or .exit.

Text Windows — one stream, one window, and the full routing rules
Build a hunting layout — where a tabbed window earns its keep on a small screen
Desktop GUI — the Windows catalog and the window right-click menu
Terminal (TUI) — .editwindow and the editor’s key map
layout.toml — every window field and its default

Config reference (TOML)

A tabbed window is widget_type = "tabbedtext", with one [[windows.tabs]] block per tab. Reference only — Edit tabs… and .editwindow write all of this.

[[windows]]
name = "comms"
widget_type = "tabbedtext"
row = 0
col = 80
rows = 20
cols = 40
buffer_size = 3000

[[windows.tabs]]
name = "Speech"
streams = ["speech"]
show_timestamps = true

[[windows.tabs]]
name = "Thoughts"
streams = ["thoughts"]
show_timestamps = true
timestamp_position = "start"

[[windows.tabs]]
name = "Group"
streams = ["group"]
ignore_activity = true

Window fields

Field	Type	Default	What it does
`tabs`	array of tab tables	`[]`	The tab list, in display order.
`buffer_size`	integer	`10000`	Scrollback lines kept per tab.
`tab_bar_position`	string	`"top"`	Where the tab strip sits.
`tab_separator`	bool	`false`	Draw a separator between tabs.
`tab_active_color`	string	theme	Color of the active tab label.
`tab_inactive_color`	string	theme	Color of inactive tab labels.
`tab_unread_color`	string	theme	Color of a tab with unread content.
`tab_unread_prefix`	string	none	Marker prefixed to an unread tab’s label.

The six presentation fields from tab_bar_position down have no editor UI today — they are TOML-only. The Tab Editor covers names, streams, Quiet, timestamps, and order.

Tab fields

Field	Type	Default	What it does
`name`	string	required	The tab’s label. Saving with an unnamed tab is refused.
`streams`	array of string	`[]`	Stream ids feeding this tab. Preferred form.
`stream`	string	none	Legacy single-stream field. When both are set, `streams` wins.
`show_timestamps`	bool	inherits `ui.show_timestamps`	Per-tab timestamp override.
`timestamp_position`	`"start"` / `"end"`	inherits `ui.timestamp_position` (`"end"`)	Per-tab timestamp placement.
`ignore_activity`	bool	`false`	The Quiet checkbox — this tab never marks itself unread.

A tab with an empty streams array and no stream receives nothing. Saving through the GUI Tab Editor writes streams and clears the legacy stream field, so any tab you touch there is migrated to the plural form.

VellumFE User Guide