For the benefit of anyone in a similar situation, this is what I did. When I had installed Codeblocks 17.12 before, I did so using the prebuilt Debian binaries. I don't know how to get wxSmith for them, so I ended up uninstalling that and building from source. I find the spell checker to be distracting, so I didn't use "--with-contrib-plugins=all". I needed to issue
./configure --with-contrib-plugins=AutoVersioning,BrowseTracker,Cccc,CppCheck,cbkoders,codesnippets,codestat,copystrings,Cscope,DoxyBlocks,dragscroll,EditorConfig,EditorTweaks,envvars,FileManager,headerfixup,help,hexeditor,incsearch,keybinder,libfinder,MouseSap,NassiShneiderman,ProjectOptionsManipulator,profiler,regex,ReopenEditor,exporter,smartindent,symtab,ThreadSearch,ToolsPlus,Valgrind,wxcontrib,wxsmith,wxsmithcontrib,wxsmithaui
. I've now got the tabs back on my manager window.