Universal Terminal: Switch with hard-coded Tabs

[hofq]

Describe the feature

The Navigation with a small single Button between the Terminals is a bid janky and was not what I expected from the universal terminal. I would love to have 1 button for each terminal on top, to switch between them like tabs.

Reasons why it should be considered

A Menu in the Style of Tabs would be a lot more useful, as it supports muscle memory

[Mari023]

there isn't really space for tabs anywhere in the GUI

see https://github.com/Mari023/AE2WirelessTerminalLibrary/blob/main/src/main/resources/texture_references/crafting-REF-FULL.png, tho in the smallest size (320×240), it is actually just two rows tall.
The space right of the inventory is already occupied by the network tool.
The space above and below isn't available (it would go out of bounds).
The space right next to the crafting grid is already used on the pattern encoding terminal, and doesn't exist on the pattern access terminal.

The only place where there would be consistently space in all terminals is left of the button row, and I don't really like the look of that.

[hofq]

maybe you could remove the Text that says Terminal and put the tabs on top?

[Quest79]

Hi this took me way too long to edit in Photoshop lol but this is what i was personally envisioning it look like. Top of the buttons aligns with grid and isnt taller than the crafting status button. Buttons ideally are static and dont move even one pixel when changing tabs. (text can just be moved or removed)

[Mari023]

Replacing the text might work, there would be problems if there ever are more than 4 terminals that would cause problems.

This is already the case.

[Mithi83]

I disagree with your statement, that there are no more than 3 terminals. In fact you offer an API to register an arbitrary number of additional wireless terminals that could in theory all be combined. Right now it is not yet widely used, but at least ExtendedAE has added a Wireless Extended Pattern Access Terminal and I remember your efforts to get a PR into merequester.

[Mari023]

I disagree with your statement, that there are no more than 3 terminals. In fact you offer an API to register an arbitrary number of additional wireless terminals that could in theory all be combined. Right now it is not yet widely used, but at least ExtendedAE has added a Wireless Extended Pattern Access Terminal and I remember your efforts to get a PR into merequester.

you are right, I realized that a few day ago too, while debugging something unrelated.

while the assumption that I made that there are you realistically aren't using the three different variants of the pattern encoding terminal at once is imo still reasonable for this, I forgot about the transmutation terminal, so once I (or someone else) finally finish the me requester terminal we are already over that limit of 4.

[NuanKi]

I opened a PR with a different approach: #375
The Universal Terminal button now shows the current terminal icon. Clicking it opens a small selector with the installed terminals, then closes after picking one.
It keeps direct selection without permanently taking space in the GUI, which should scale better with addon terminals.
I also added Shift + mouse wheel cycling while holding the Universal Terminal outside a GUI (in the world) to cycle between them without opening the WUT.
There’s a short video in the PR.