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.