On 5 Sep 2019, at 22:32, Andrew Hodgkinson wrote:

To be honest, I'm surprised it isn't the default. This is of course just a subjective opinion!

My thinking was that a full tab bar (that degrades into an overflow menu) is a bigger annoyance than having stale tabs auto-close.

For me, having tabs close and lose tab ordering and positioning is quite destructive to workflow, especially when working in projects with large numbers of files. I have to go scrolling up and down in the file browser trying to relocate something I'd opened for reference but has now closed again.

Are you aware of File → Open Quickly… (⌘T)?

This opens a list of recently used files and offers a much faster way to re-open files.

When using ⌘T the order of tabs, and which are open, becomes less important, and this also influenced my decision about the current behavior with re-ordering and auto-closing.

But you do have a point that it’s not expected behavior, for now, I have made the disableTabAutoClose available through a checkbox in preferences: https://github.com/textmate/textmate/commit/d9ac41d7900370b85bcf1d0c25ef58c4fbc44a60

I think you’re the first user to bring up this issue, so I’m hesitant to change the current defaults, but you do have a good point that tabs should behave predictable, so I may reconsider them in the future.

Has there been any consideration to using the current macOS system-wide tab bar instead?

As far as I know this is only available by using the document based architecture where the system basically collapses the applications multiple windows into tabs.

So it’s not a component that can just be adopted, we would have to re-engineer the application to use the document based APIs, and there is likely to be some disadvantages to doing that. But I am slowly moving the internals toward NSDocument and friends.