Tabs: add option to show left/right bindings to appear in footer

[dan-zheng]

left and right bindings for Tabs have hardcoded show=False, making it so the bindings never appear in Footer widgets.

textual/src/textual/widgets/_tabs.py

Lines 207 to 210 in f02cde2

	BINDINGS: ClassVar[list[BindingType]] = [
	Binding("left", "previous_tab", "Previous tab", show=False),
	Binding("right", "next_tab", "Next tab", show=False),
	]

Adding a show: bool argument to Tabs would be nice to enable customizing this behavior.

[TomJGooding]

There's many widgets in Textual that don't show all the bindings, to avoid the footer becoming too cluttered.

You can easily show the bindings you want by sub-classing the widget.

from textual.app import App, ComposeResult
from textual.binding import Binding
from textual.widgets import Footer, Tab, Tabs


class MyTabs(Tabs):
    BINDINGS = [
        Binding("left", "previous_tab", "Previous tab", show=True),
        Binding("right", "next_tab", "Next tab", show=True),
    ]


class ExampleApp(App):
    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        yield MyTabs(
            Tab("First tab", id="one"),
            Tab("Second tab", id="two"),
        )
        yield Footer()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = ExampleApp()
    app.run()

[dan-zheng]

Thanks!

Subclassing seems trickier since I'm actually using a TabbedContent and not Tabs directly.

Do you have any suggestions here?

[TomJGooding]

Ah, yes that is more tricky. (And adding an option to Tabs wouldn't solve this either.)

You might find this discussion helpful - it sounds like the Textual maintainers do plan to revisit the way that users can discover bindings.

• Is there a way to display default key bindings in the footer that are normally hidden? #3302 (comment)

[davep]

Moving this over to "Ideas". As Tom points out, the whole issue of bindings is something we'll be revisiting in the future. Meanwhile though, while I'd never advocate for diving into internals as a long-term solution, you could do something like this if you want those particular keys displayed in the footer:

from dataclasses import replace

from textual.app import App, ComposeResult
from textual.widgets import TabbedContent, TabPane, Footer, Label, Tabs

class TabNavFooterApp(App[None]):

    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        with TabbedContent():
            with TabPane("One"):
                yield Label("One")
            with TabPane("Two"):
                yield Label("Two")
        yield Footer()

    def on_mount(self) -> None:
        tab_keys = self.query_one(Tabs)._bindings.keys
        tab_keys["left"] = replace(tab_keys["left"], show=True)
        tab_keys["right"] = replace(tab_keys["right"], show=True)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    TabNavFooterApp().run()