There is a way to set up a tabbed interface -- but only in a single Notebook. This 7-minute video shows how. IMHO, that would be incredibly convoluted way to be hacking your User Interface on the fly. I suppose you could create an empty Notebook with all of the scaffolding in place and reuse that as you grow new Notebooks. Alternatively, you could present your code to an AI and ask it to add the scaffolding -- and hope the AI gets it right. In either case, Wolfram's option really no substitute for an interface that allows to quickly flip between all Notebooks with tabs. Perhaps Wolfram Research will adopt a fully blown tabbed UI in the feature. BTW: I hadn't realized that the history of documentation topics was available as a pull-down. That's almost as good as tabs for the docs!
The way tabs work reveal a fundamental philosophy of the Wolfram Language. Someone immersed in the Wolfram Language could probably cobble these together in their muscle memory. It's an incredibly capable system, but you need a certain criticality of information to wrap your head around it. There's a big up-front investment, but it pays off in the end. On the flip side, Wolfram pays a penalty because their software is decidedly not friendly to new users. OTOH, I could imagine highly experienced users building those "tabs" solely with their muscle memory.
I noted that you can look up the full form of "==", "@@@" and ALL the shortcuts easily by entering them in the documentation. You can also do that by simply saying:
FullForm[exp1 == exp2]
in the Wolfram Language itself. The App will tell you:
Equal[exp1, exp2]
The joker comes if you say:
FullForm[exp1 === exp2]
which simply returns:
False
At first blush, that's really confusing. But you can get the "correct" result by saying:
FullForm[Hold[exp1 === exp2]]
Which returns:
Hold [SameQ [exp1, exp2]]
That's better! I don't this course ever explicitly talks about Hold -- delay evaluation -- but it does talk
about := (SetDelayed) and :> (RuleDelayed). Those are powerful design elements in the language. It's really valuable to "have a play" with those ideas by diddling around in the Wolfram Language (as Rory has famously said in this course). Little Aha! moments is the keystone to thriving in this environment. I like to think it give you a way to touch the Great Minds that designed this machinery. It's a beautiful design, but you must work a bit to understand and appreciate it. Sometimes, you don't realize what you have learned until you try to teach it to others.
The Wolfram Language -- Mathematica -- has been available for 38 years. Stephen wrote about this back in 2018. He fired up an ancient (1986 - 1988 era) Mac, saved a notebook in Mathematica 1.0, then imported it to current Mathematica -- Version 11.3 back in 2018 -- and it just worked. That whole freakin' blog article is about Stephen "having a play" on that early version of Mathematica running on an ancient Mac with 2.5MB (!!!) of RAM. You can almost hear the giddy excitement when he witnessed that ancient Notebook running correctly. Wow.
You can learn a lot about Wolfram's priorities from the blog article. You can also learn the flip side: a tabbed interface hasn't been a priority. Adopting the ubiquitous Discourse for user community discussions isn't a priority. It is what it is. On another flip side, maintaining a free version of the Wolfram Language for the Raspberri Pi for the past 12 years is also mightily impressive. Wolfram Research has its priorities. I'm just curious if anyone on the inside pounds away for adopting Discourse for the community, or if they figure that's not a battle worth fighting. I'll end with another OG ASCII emoji: :-)
