I was about to suggest this as well; I think it would be a great help (at least to me
).
My preference would be to replace the document selector listbox with a TreeView control, with support for drag-and-drop so that files can be reorganized on the fly (functionally, the same way you can move folders back and forth within other folders in a Windows Explorer tree view pane). This way I could keep numerous ancillary files open in my workspace, but keep the files I'm actively working on grouped together.
(Alternatively, perhaps the doc selector could be split into two subpanels, one with the flat listview as exists now, and one with the treeview -- the treeview could be populated and organized on the fly by drag-and-drop both within the tree itself and from the flat list to the tree. This would have the advantage of allowing me to put only the files I'm working on in the treeview, while having access to all other open files through the flat list.)
It would be great if this could be tied in to document class definitions, too -- for example, so that when a library and its corresponding header file are both opened, the library appears in the tree as a child of the header file (or vice versa). This isn't strictly necessary, though, as I could do that on my own with the drag-and-drop functionality described above; as long as 'Save Workspace' would save the tree structure, that would be enough for my purposes.)
I like chadjohnson's idea of 'virtual dirs', too. The context menu could allow the user to insert a 'dummy' node into the tree which doesn't refer to an open document, but which can be used as a parent node for open files, just so we can keep things better organized.
Whether this gets implemented or not, to any devs who read this, great work! I started using TextPad in junior high school, bought it a couple of years later (sorry it took a while, no credit card back then
), and now that I'm finished university and working professionally, I'm
still using it -- I can't think of many other programs that have stood up so well over time.