Since I've argued before that the tab bar is not effective for my style of working, I should add my support to some of these ideas.
On Jan 4, 2005, at 10:35 AM, Sam Andrews wrote:
In my daily experience the one row of tabs (both in TextMate and Eclipse) just adds noise because you have just a handful of opened files there, whereas I tipically have a lot more. Because of that the tab selector is in fact useless most of the time, and the interface it enforces makes looking for an opened file not in the tabs something exceptional, I mean, it is not the default interface, the easy one, but it is the one I normally need.
This is my experience for my usage patterns.
On 4-Jan-05, at 5:28 AM, Xavier Noria wrote:
If I think further I believe the distinction between opened files and files in the project is artificial. It is a traditional distinction, but tradition sometimes can be improved as iTunes did.
I agree with this. I am amazed at (and impressed by!) those of you who only work with several files at one time, and know that you are finished with a file and are able to close it. Obviously I have far less foresight in my work patterns -- I don't want my editor to force me to have to manage these details.
I think there have been several excellent ideas proposed in this thread. The spotlight filtered textfield is a very strong idea. Emacs has a buffer search with filename completion that provides much of this functionality. As proposed in this thread with proper ui feedback, this would be very powerful.
Grouping related files into a single tab is an interesting idea, however, I'm not convinced that the effort to create and maintain these groups, and the ui required to differentiate between members of a tab group and shortcuts between them would make the idea really effective.
At the risk of repeatedly banging the same drum, I also believe that working history is also a useful way to switch between files. Having a keyboard shortcut to page between files in the order they have been opened would allow one to quickly switch between files in a working set in an ad hoc fashion.
The most useful combination, imo then would be: * Project Drawer * History List * Spotlight Like filtered search
Whether you retain the tab bar as is, add a file list view, eliminate the tab bar completely, or some other proposal does not matter-- this would be a minor detail since that visual feedback provided by the tabs would not be necessary.
Regards, Wayne