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I reckon it would be a good idea to have multiple workspaces - even just two.
For example; I am working on a group of source files. I am cutting/pasting from another (read-only) group. Alphabetic listing mixes them. It would be nice to have two separate groups. Perhaps partition the workspace pane into two ?

Why not work with two instances of Textpad?

I do this all the time. I just open two TextPad windows, and then open a different workspace in each instance. Works like a charm.

Yeah - I have worked like this but there are several disadvantages, two of which are:-
* Searches, macros, etc. don't work across instances,
* It's easier to work entirely within a single fulled Textpad window.

Multiple instances works fine for me.

I agree with Jim. Having a WorkspaceManager inside of TextPad, is preferred. In the same way you have document tabs, you could have Workspace tabs. Click on a workspace, the File Selector changes to reflect that workspace. I'd rather have 5 workspaces than 5 instances of textpad running.
My current mulitple instances of Textpad: Perl1, Perl2, HTML, XML, scratch (sometimes)

The scratch is because often times I will copy/paste output from a telnet to unix window into Textpad, then print it. I sometimes forget to delete these documents that are in a particular workspace, or even remember which workspace had them.

I would also like to be able to open multiple workspaces in one instance of TextPad. I have been using multiple instances for a little while now (after reading this thread) and it does have some unpleasant side effects. The one that particularly bothers me is the overwriting of most-recently-used lists.

Whichever instance of TP closes last will save its own view of the most recent files, searches and workspaces.

Open instance 1 of TP, then open instance 2.
Use instance 2 to open files, create workspaces and perform searches.
Quit instance 2 and then instance 1.
Open TP again and it's as if instance 2 never happened. Any workspaces you just created in instance 2 will be saved but they don't appear in the most recent list and neither do your most recent files or searches.

In my case I'm using one instance for general files that I want to be available all the time, work log, to-do list, etc. Then I'll have a second instance for whatever project I'm currently working on. The natural way for me to work is open the general instance first and close it last. If I did that then the workspaces for my projects and the searches I use for source code would never appear in the MRU list.

The tree view workspace proposed in another thread could mitigate this problem because then I might be able to have a single large workspace with the general files on one branch and each project on a separate branch. In that case it might be nice to be able to export and import branches of the tree so old workspaces could be pruned from the tree but still saved so I could easily go back to that project later.

BTW, I love TextPad. It's a high quality product and I really appreciate that.

I think the topic Treeview in the document selector has something in common with this one.
In my opinion if the current Workspaces would become Projects, and a new type of workspace could contain many projects (or with a similar solution), then all the mentioned advantages could be pushed.