[Video Tutorial] Use tabs in Pixelmator Pro

Discuss and share Pixelmator Pro resources such as templates, mockups, and tutorials.
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2018-05-31 09:56:47

With tabs, you can easily stop windows from piling up on your desktop by editing several different images in one Pixelmator Pro window.

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2018-06-05 10:55:57

Tabs are awesome! Thanks for this feature.

To make it even better... it would be great to have the option to save a project made up of multiple tabs, rather than having to save each tab individually.
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2018-06-05 15:49:27

by NeilZ 2018-06-05 10:55:57 Tabs are awesome! Thanks for this feature.

To make it even better... it would be great to have the option to save a project made up of multiple tabs, rather than having to save each tab individually.
Interesting! That sounds like a somewhat tricky thing to do well, but I'll absolutely add it to the feature request list.
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2018-06-23 14:44:27

Just adding to this so people understand that the Tabs situation has to be turned on with your System Preferences of your Mac in order for them to be there on a permanent basis (so you don't have to merge the images into tabs every time and so it works as the video shows). You can do the following to make this work correctly (but I'm hoping that this is something they will address in the app so it's not a system preference, took me hours to find how to do this which shouldn't have had to happen):

Open your Mac's System Preferences (I'll assume you know how to do this). Go to the Dock settings. At the end area there's a section for "Prefer tabs when opening documents: Set that to "Always" and you're all set!

This is something we should not have to do though, I want to stress this because first, it's not even mentioned in the video how to turn the Tabs on in any way, it's assuming we already know to do this and that's a huge assumption. Second, we shouldn't have to edit our entire Mac's preferences to change things within an app such as these changes. Since that affects "all" things on our computers, that's a very large effect for the app to expect that from us. This should be something set within the app itself that overrides the default settings of the system.

Just my opinion, but either way, that's how it works at this time, and people should be alerted of this in the video, otherwise the video is useless as it doesn't work that way on installation at all if you don't have that set up in system settings, and that is a very confusing thing for people that may not know how to find out where to fix it.
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2018-06-25 09:23:47

by Jo Rice 2018-06-23 14:44:27 Just adding to this so people understand that the Tabs situation has to be turned on with your System Preferences of your Mac in order for them to be there on a permanent basis (so you don't have to merge the images into tabs every time and so it works as the video shows). You can do the following to make this work correctly (but I'm hoping that this is something they will address in the app so it's not a system preference, took me hours to find how to do this which shouldn't have had to happen):

Open your Mac's System Preferences (I'll assume you know how to do this). Go to the Dock settings. At the end area there's a section for "Prefer tabs when opening documents: Set that to "Always" and you're all set!

This is something we should not have to do though, I want to stress this because first, it's not even mentioned in the video how to turn the Tabs on in any way, it's assuming we already know to do this and that's a huge assumption. Second, we shouldn't have to edit our entire Mac's preferences to change things within an app such as these changes. Since that affects "all" things on our computers, that's a very large effect for the app to expect that from us. This should be something set within the app itself that overrides the default settings of the system.

Just my opinion, but either way, that's how it works at this time, and people should be alerted of this in the video, otherwise the video is useless as it doesn't work that way on installation at all if you don't have that set up in system settings, and that is a very confusing thing for people that may not know how to find out where to fix it.
That's a fair point, though I'd just like to explain a little bit about why we chose to do this — with Pixelmator Pro (and all the Pixelmator apps) we try to keep things completely native to the OS, which means things like iCloud support coming and working as standard, default macOS versioning support, and respecting system settings for features like tabs. I do agree that it could be made more obvious in the video (we actually had a draft version explaining the System Preferences bit). I think we'll either improve this video in the future or add an additional note/guide explaining how to set up tabs in macOS.
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2019-01-19 20:39:54

Had I not read Jo Rice's comments regarding the tabs I would be none the wiser and still searching for instructions. This is a major omission Andrius!