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Like in tabbed browser these days (AvantBrowser, Firebird, CrazyBrowser), it can be cool to be able to close a window, thus a tab, by wheel clicking the tab itself.

It is just an ease of use feature.

do you mean anywhere in the window or what? I like this idea, but rapid scrolling could have you closing things unexpectedly

You should try AvantBrowser out: it's a great wrapper around IE. Basically, when you're finished with a page, you just wheel click on the tab (the name of the page) and it disappears. Nice feature for browsing, and when you get used to it, you suffer from softs which don't have it

ah, ok, so on the actual tab name - makes sense now

I use AvantBrowser and Mozilla Firebird nearly 100% of the time I'm not in TextPad, and the convention of middle-clicking tabs to close them is definitely a good one, and terribly addictive.

Since TextPad doesn't have this feature now, I'm constantly going to the tab's content menu and clicking Close, but Print is TOO CLOSE to close and I alll-too-often end up having to dive to the printer to shut it off and then cancel the print job.

richardtallent wrote:Since TextPad doesn't have this feature now, I'm constantly going to the tab's content menu and clicking Close, but Print is TOO CLOSE to close and I alll-too-often end up having to dive to the printer to shut it off and then cancel the print job.

You might be interested in the shareware FinePrint http://www.fineprint.com/products/fineprint/index.html I have it set as my default printer, and it always launches a print preview window--very useful if I ever accidently press print!
Otherwise, try to make a habit of using the 'x' button in the upper-right corner or pressing the Ctrl+F4 hotkey.

Double clicking on a tab name to close the document is even better, since not everyone has a mouse with a scroller

Double clicking on a tab name to close the document is even better, since not everyone has a mouse with a scroller

That may be true - but it's also true that the cost of a new mouse is peanuts. My an optical three-button wheel mouse was something like twenty quid (British pounds), which is less than you'd pay for a couple of music CDs.

Possessing a wheel mouse would enhance not just TextPad but many, many other programs that people use. I don't think it's reasonable to expect every application under the sun to restrict its UI to two-button mice, and I'm not sure there's a good reason why TextPad should be any different in this regard.

That said, I'm not entirely in favor of this feature as currently proposed anyway, because I think there's too much risk of closing a window by accident. Perhaps the really sensible thing to do would be to allow the "close this window" action to be assigned to any type of mouse click the user desires (including mouse actions involving shift keys, and including not at all) when clicking on a document tab (or listing in the document selector window?)

Jill

I agree with fthomas, the original poster. I had never heard of such a middle click feature before but now I find the opera browser implements it -- it's very cool! Having been a video game junkie with that quick-twitch addiction, and liking keyboard shortcuts, I much prefer it to dragging the mouse over to click the little X at the upper right.