[TxMt] how do you close excess tabbed files?

[Allan Odgaard]

On Jan 3, 2005, at 18:46, Fred B. wrote:

> Maybe I'm missing something, but, what is the advantage of tabs over 
> project's drawer?
> Who really use tabs over drawer for big projects and why?

For the TextMate project I (almost) always have ReleaseNotes_in.txt and 
ToDo.txt open in two tabs, and then I generally make changes which 
require only 1-3 files open (which I close when I'm done).

Tabs allow me to quickly navigate in this hot set with keys (the visual 
aspect of them is negligible), and I can re-arrange them to have two 
files I often switch between next to each other.

Locating the file in the project drawer is probably 1-5 seconds 
compared to 0.1-0.8 seconds switching to it using cmd-option 
left/right.

> I can see something like 50 files at the sale time in the drawer, 
> while I rarely see more than 10 tabs at once.

My hot set is rarely >5 and my TextMate project contains >100 sources 
alone. And the drawer is certainly more work to use.

> Now when you navigate thru files in the drawer with up and down 
> arrows, you have to hit Return to open the file (even Enter don't 
> work).
> Wouldn't it be better if the files were opened as soon as they are 
> selected?

Passing over 5 files to open one longer down the list would then result 
in 5 open files.

> [...] when I select mails with arrows in Mail.app the mails are opened 
> directly.

But it doesn't keep them open. But maybe that was also indirectly your 
request.

> Now you can have a file opened while the selected file in the drawer 
> is another one and the tab of the opened file is hidden, the only 
> place where you can see the name of the file you're working on is the 
> title bar. This is a bit confusing, IMHO.

hmm... having the name of the open file in the title bar is quite 
standard ;)

> I love tabs in a lot os apps, but I can't really see the point in TM.
> Sorry if I miss something.

Tabs doesn't necessarily offer value to all. For me with my projects 
it's definitely easier to locate a file among a few tabs than in the 
project drawer, and it gives the history kind of back/forward hot keys.