Navigating to next and previous window (document tab)

General questions about using TextPad

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wcyee
Posts: 5
Joined: Sat Mar 29, 2008 8:31 am

Navigating to next and previous window (document tab)

Post by wcyee »

Is there a keyboard shortcut to move to the next or previous document tab? CTRL+TAB works but it goes to the last document. Since I keep the Document Tabs view visible, I'd like to just move to the next or previous tab using the keyboard. I'm thinking of the way TextMate does it on the Mac (CMD+Left/Right, I think) or how Firefox does it with browser tabs (CTRL+PageUp/PageDown).

Thanks.
drefty
Posts: 35
Joined: Mon Dec 22, 2003 3:53 pm

Post by drefty »

CTRL+TAB goes in one direction, CTRL+SHIFT+TAB goes in the other direction. Is that not exactly what you were looking for?
ak47wong
Posts: 703
Joined: Tue Aug 12, 2003 9:37 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Post by ak47wong »

Well, he already mentioned Ctrl+Tab, so it's unlikely to be exactly what he was looking for. He wants a command that will always move to the adjacent document tab as shown on the screen. So if he has three tabs:

Document3 | Document2 | Document1

he would like Ctrl+Page Down to always go to Document1 and Ctrl+Page Up to always go to Document3. Unfortunately, I don't think such a keyboard shortcut exists in TextPad.

Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab cycle through documents in the order they've been used, which is not necessarily the order they appear on the screen.

Andrew
wcyee
Posts: 5
Joined: Sat Mar 29, 2008 8:31 am

Post by wcyee »

Hi - Yes, that's exactly what I meant. Ever since I got used to tabbed documents and tabbed browsing, I've found that it's much faster to navigate between documents by just moving right/left rather than the CTRL+TAB cycling order.

Basically, if the tabs are:

Document3 | Document2 | Document1

and I'm on Document1 wanting to get to Document3, then I just glance at the tabs, hit CTRL+PageUp twice and I know I'll get there. CTRL+TAB isn't as fast because if you've been working on Doc1 for a while, and you don't remember the cycling order, you need to cycle until you find the document you were after.

This is an annoyance when you have many documents open. So the visual clue plus quick keystrokes work well together.

TextMate on the Mac allows something like this. I believe they use CMD+Right/Left Arrow keys, which is even more intuitive than PageUp/PageDn.

Anyway, I thought I'd ask. This would be nice to have in the next version of TextPad.

Thank you.
ak47wong
Posts: 703
Joined: Tue Aug 12, 2003 9:37 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Post by ak47wong »

wcyee wrote:Basically, if the tabs are:

Document3 | Document2 | Document1

and I'm on Document1 wanting to get to Document3, then I just glance at the tabs, hit CTRL+PageUp twice and I know I'll get there.
Personally, I'd press CTRL+Page Down, but I know what you mean :D

Andrew
wcyee
Posts: 5
Joined: Sat Mar 29, 2008 8:31 am

Post by wcyee »

Heh. You're right, of course. :-p
drefty
Posts: 35
Joined: Mon Dec 22, 2003 3:53 pm

Post by drefty »

Well, you probably won't like this answer, but to those for whom this is a huge annoyance, there is a workaround. Simply manually re-order the tabs by hand until the visual order exactly reflects the pre-defined tabbing order.

Yes, it is another one of those GUI behavior inconsistencies across apps that would be nice to change to be more like Firefox.
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