[TxMt] how do you close excess tabbed files?

[Xavier Noria]

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