Total Commander

You have Double click

Double click brings focus to a closed tab - this is not a usable way to close backgound tabs

Midle Mouse button and Context menu. Double click is much faster for me than trying to hit a small x

Here I also can repeat the argument with trackpad use - when you're on the trackpad this is no way to push the middle button! In trackpad situation the best way to close some background tabs is to hit all these "x"

but my guess is that the majority of TC users don't use the mouse in TC

Here I see great use of TC not only by power users but by the old-fashioned people and computer beginners who just love the simplicity of the two-panel file manager. For these categories close buttons can be a really useful feature.

But I'm not an adversary of having a possibility to add close buttons.

Yep!

Beta8 - still no close button ((

Some people wait for years but you want to get new feature in a moment.

That's me, my friend ))

Somewhere I read about simultaneous left and right moust clicks as a replacement for middle click.
Holding Ctrl and clicking with good timing I can open and close tabs.
Not very pructical though.

PS. Double click for tab closing is non-standard and even annoying sometimes, but that is my opinion and not a suggestion to drop it right now.

Just posting here to second that I would also really like have a close button on the directory tabs. That would be especially useful for closing background tabs that are no longer needed. Of course it should be configurable so that nobody is forced to "waste" space if they don't need them.

Ideally those buttons would only be shown when hovering the tab and not displayed all the time, just like (for example) the Vivaldi browser does.

Everything has its pros and cons.

Just bringing up this old thread again as this is still an option I would really appreciate if it were added to TC - configurable of course. There's already a settings windows that configures which icons are shown on folder tabs, that's IMHO a good place to add an option for a close button.

I do not use close buttons in Opera browser to avoid accidentally closing a tab while clicking it quickly (and a web browser is increasingly often laggy). The double-click action in TC does not fit the close command, as it is easy to put two clicks by accident, especially if the double-click time is long as it is (was?) by default in Windows. And by double-click I expect something else to happen: Renaming of the tab, perhaps Lock, but never Close.

The best choice for me is Ctrl-Click, which is slightly confusing, because in Opera the command is Shift-Click. Ctrl-Click isn't likely to activate by accident, and the entire tab area is available for clicking, as opposed to a small close button. How do you aim at a small close button on trackpad?

My personal preference is to not use keyboard/mouse combinations, especially not for rather "simple" tasks, I either use the keyboard alone (then Ctrl+W is working fine for closing tabs) or I use the mouse (more or less) alone, for this I would really like a convenient way to close tabs. Double-clicking them is not really intuitive to me either so I disabled that option in the settings.

There's probably a lot of ways to close tabs, and each method has it's pros and cons, so that's why I suggested to add another (rather common) method as an option(!) which could be enabled/disabled through the settings. Maybe when adding a close button, other methods (Ctrl+Click) could be added as well and configuration for all the various close methods could be cleaned up/streamlined a bit?!