Felmon Davis wrote:

> On Wed, 18 May 2016, Felix Miata wrote:
> 
>> Lisi Reisz composed on 2016-05-18 16:40 (UTC+0100):
>>
>>> Jan Stolarek composed on 2016-05-18 17:33 (UTC+0200):
>>
>>>> As for Ctrl+Up/Down for tab switching to me this is counter-intuitive.
>>>> Tabs
>>>> are displayed horizontally. Using keys for vertical movement to switch
>>>> between them does not make much sense to me.
>>
>> This is why an alternate tab switching option employed in other apps
>> includes the tab key.
>>
>> Did you ever use a real tab, such as sheets in a ring binder or pages in
>> a printed manual? Those tabs are each an extension of a layer constituted
>> of one or more pages. Even today, paper manuals often use pseudo-tabs,
>> pages with contrasting colors at different positions on pages' ends to
>> correspond to different chapters, e.g. my Magnavox DVR and Brother
>> printer.
>>
>>> They are numbered 1,2,3,4 etc.  One usually regards numbers as going up
>>> and down.
>>
>> Not so much that as the physics of real rather than virtual tabs. Yes,
>> they look like they are horizontal, but each real tab is attached to a
>> layer. Each can overlap one or more others, completely hiding them. One
>> goes up and down through anything that is layered, unless the whole
>> layered stack is stood on end, in which case movement within layers in
>> the stack becomes fore and aft, not side to side.
> 
> wow! people are really taking a metaphor very seriously! someone calls
> a bit of coding a 'tab' and that generates an argument about whether
> the coding should look like a book!
> 
> as I vaguely recall there were similar scholastic arguments about the
> metaphor of a 'desktop' or 'folders' and such.
> 
> these arguments are as difficult to settle as the dispute Swift
> recounts of the quarrel between the 'Big-endians' and 'Little-endians'
> in _Gulliver's Travels_! and that was causa belli!
> 
> (itself a parodic mirror of the dispute between 'Catholic' vs
> 'Protestant' in Ireland, well of course this wasn't purely
> theological....)
> 
> say here's what we do: let's code 'tabs' so they go up and down the
> right or left side for the 'Up-endians' and so they go along the
> bottom or top for 'side-winders'!
> 
> I'm a 'side-winder' myself but will willingly concede the word 'tab'
> to the 'Up-endians' if they insist - what's in a name?
> 
> but my fellow side-winders will insist on their metaphysics: tabs are
> 'really' left-right, after all some books have tabs at the top or
> bottom so....
> 
> f.
> 

Lisi,
"tab" is coming from the maps with tabs AFAIK - from the paper world. This
is a normal process in language(s) to use the description of something old
for something new with similar function.
Some are horizontal, some are vertical. 
The relation between the tabulator button and the tab/folder is however not
clear to me. And to me it is a mere convention that we use ALT+Tab to
switch between application windows, CTRL+PgUp/PgDn to switch between tabs
in firefox and Shift+right/left to switch between the konsole windows.
However similar to the languages, if convention is already there, it is
usually hard to change, because people get use to it.
This given as argument, I see the option for Felix to change it himself ...
there are many ways to do so.

regards