On Jan 4, 2005, at 10:35 AM, Sam Andrews wrote:
i often work with pretty bloated projects, and the tabs don't really work for me, either. my personal preference would be for a list of active files displayed in the drawer - so split the drawer between that and the project file list, as shown in this mockup:
http://dev.samandrews.com/misc/tm1.jpg (121k jpg)
to further extend the functionality of this view, it might be desirable to indicate some basic metadata for open files such as last saved, number of bookmarks (useful if you use bookmarks to track your to-do items) and so forth. i think the spotlight-esque filter as xavier proposed could also be very useful.
I second that proposal. 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.
I recognize nevertheless that tab reordering and the tabs themselves have been in the promotion of TextMate from the start. The Eclipse interface (that want I sent in a movie) could be seen as an evolution of the current interface, and the list in the drawer with metadata could be seen as a new feature. By now I don't know how I'd introduce that new feature in a coherent way though.
-- fxn