Stacked document selectors (tabs) shouldn't rearrange

[jumpfroggy]

When you turn on Stacked document selectors (Preferences, View, Tabbed Document Selector) you can have multiple document selectors (tabs) at the bottom. When you select a document, that row of selectors moves to the top and the selector for your document becomes active. It becomes hard this way to remember where anything is.

A better way would be to keep the rows in order of when they were opened (like normal), and when you select a document the rows would stay the same (not move to the top) and the appropriate document selector would activate. This way you can always think "I'm editing the document in the bottom row, 2nd from the right" vs. "I'm editing one of the files that is moving around every time I select another document". It helps with spacial memory/navigation.

Comments?

[MudGuard]

AFAIK the tabs used by Textpad are a windows control - it's the same one that is used in many property dialogs in windows and windows applications. You will find the same behaviour there, the row containing the active tab is moved to the front.

To me it seems like a waste of a lot of time to write such a control again just for that little feature - time that could be used for more important changes (ok, I don't use the document tabs so I do not really need an improvement in them ...)

[jumpfroggy]

Mud: If the tabs are a windows control, then yes it may be too much work for such a small change. But if they are a custom made item anyway, the change could be relatively simple. I personally don't know what kind of control Textpad uses, so I can't answer that.

It is very similar to the windows standard tabbing, but I can't recall if the windows control allows bottom tabs (as opposed to top tabs... textpad can do both). Also, the borders and drawing don't look like windows standard (though those could be customized).

Bottom line is that this feature (not rearranging rows) would be better. Certainly Helios would take the dev time into consideration. It'd be interesting to see if the control truly is a windows standard component... I'd assume a winspy-like utility would be able to grab the class name, and that might be enlightening. Don't have one on me at the moment...

[MudGuard]

Good idea with the spy.

It says: SysTabControl32

It seems as if the TCS_RIGHT style flag makes it appear at the bottom instead of the top.

According to http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/defau ... styles.asp TCS_RIGHT is the same value as TCS_BOTTOM.