I just had an epiphany about what I do and do not like about the current Vendetta chat system.

The tab concept is one that has great value in keeping certain types of communication discrete, however it does the job -too- well, dividing up things that someone might well want to have grouped together.

I'd like to suggest taking a page from Planetside's recent chat change, and allow the definition of tabs, which show things from a user-specified set of sources. This way, someone could set up a tab that shows mission info and group missions, or maybe a tab that only shows tells, or other arbitrary combinations.
It'd be good to set up the default tabs as we currently get them -- for getting started it's a reasonable distribution -- but once you start coordinating a little more heavily, the way things are now becomes less useful.

The alternative would be a paned interface, but that has its own drawbacks; namely that you reduce available screen real-estate to each pane.

Thoughts?