Thanks, Hs2: better solution!
Ding Zhaojie: you're good, as always! By the way, nice icons! How did you change the height of "Current Context" combo, and how did you trick SE to use your Tab-Control?!
SE should hire you!
You can change the vertical spacing value of the toolbar buttons. Use 2 or 3 is OK (depends on the size of your dialog font, I use 9pt so I set it to 2).
To change the appearance of the file tab, use this command:
open-form _tbbufftabs_form
Then click the tab control, and tweak the properties in the Properties dialog. Next time you start SE, you will see your unique file tabs bar
In my screen shot I set Grabber = FALSE, Orientation = SSTAB_OTOP, Padding X = 0, MultiRow = SSTAB_MULTIROW_BESFIT (don't try SSTAB_MULTIROW_MULTIROW, it is terrible).