[txmt-dev] Split Views Implementation

[Steven Clukey]

I’ve created an implementation of split views in TextMate. It is basically complete, except for one issue that I haven’t been able to fix and I am asking for help on this. I am posting it here rather than creating a Pull Request for several reasons. First, the known issue can be pretty serious, though it is not common in normal use. Second, my commits generally need work (which I appreciate, btw) and given the number of commits this may take some time to be ready for master. Third, I don’t want the pull request to become like the GitHub issue for split views, so I thought it would be better to post it here to work on, then when ready for master I’ll submit a Pull Request that can be merged quickly.

The usage is fairly simple, there are 4 new options in the View menu to control the splitting. The tab bar is global, it shows all the open document and the currently active document is highlighted. Selecting a new document in the tab bar will change the currently active split to show that document. Closing a document closes it from all of the splits that are showing it. The active document is changed by clicking inside a document (or menu options in Windows). Thats pretty much it.

Now the issue: if there are many documents open and they are closed “too fast" (holding CMD+W works) then the coherence of the documents is lost and the windows may end up in a state where closing “Untitled” opens “Untitled 2”, and closing “Untitled 2” opens “Untitled” and the window doesn’t close. Worse yet, the splits do not show a new document, they show documents that should have already been closed. I believe this is caused by the fact that `openAndSelectDocument` is somewhat asynchronous, and “too fast” perhaps means that the documents are closed faster than the new documents are open. But, since I have not been able to fix this problem perhaps my assessment is wrong.

The implementation is on my fork:
https://github.com/sclukey/textmate/commits/split_views

Thanks,
Steven Clukey