[TxMt] how do you close excess tabbed files?

[Mats Persson]

Here's my two cent's worth of input.


On 4 Jan 2005, at 09:35, 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)

Sam, please accept my apologies as it's not personal, but I have to 
pass on the following comment to your proposal.

Allan, I sincerely beg you - on my knees, hands firmly clasped - to 
PLEASE NOT implement anything like that in TM. It reeks of BBEdit, and 
is in my mind a completely flawed implementation.


A far better improvement on the current implementation would - in my 
mind at least - be a larger sized overflow ">>" tab at the end of the 
bar to handle the overflow files.  The size of this tab should be of 
dynamic size to fill the space between the last normal tab and the end 
of window, and big enough to display the same widgets & text as a 
normal tab, but also a  [ N ] (number of files in tab).

On selecting the tab - via mouse or keyboard - a pop-down tab menu 
would appear, with the standard tab layout ( ie close widget + file 
name). Using the normal tab navigation key commands, would highlight 
the selected file in the pop-down menu, and then the top tab text would 
display the active file name. Think HTML Select pop-up menu 
functionality.

If you wish to move a file from the overflow tab, then you would just 
move it as a normal tab, and the last normal tab in the existing tab 
bar moves into the overflow tab. (Hope you followed me there ? )

While I'm at it. How difficult would it be to implement the following:  
Apple+Alt+Shift+ <left/right arrow> to actually move the order of tabs 
via the keyboard ???

To me that solves much of the problems, as the overflow tabs follow the 
same functionality as normal tabs. Love to hear your views.


On 2 Jan 2005, at 19:55, Allan Odgaard wrote:
> So a group is configured how? And should it be possible to do ad hoc 
> grouping by e.g. dropping one tab on another tab (to make it into a 
> group), and exactly how does a group affect navigation?

I too like the idea of group based tabs, where all .css files were 
stored in one single tab and so on, but I can't see how that 
implementation would work any better than the current implementation. 
What happens when you select a file in a group tab, does it take over 
the visibility of that tab, or open in a new tab ?? How would you 
navigate this group tab scenario with the keyboard ??


On 4 Jan 2005, at 06:53, Allan Odgaard wrote:
> 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.

Absolutely! Tabs rocks, and it is the way to go. No doubt!!

> My hot set is rarely >5 and my TextMate project contains >100 sources 
> alone. And the drawer is certainly more work to use.

I too close down unused files as soon as I've stopped working on them, 
as it's relatively quick and easy to open them up again when needed. 
But I guess we are dealing with personal habits & 'discipline' here.



Kind regards,

Mats