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I use textpad a lot for website design. Normally the files I have to edit are located in long paths like: [C:\websites\HostRack Nr5\www.mynewsite.com\HTML\index.html]. Usually there are many files located in, more or less, the same directory.

When the document selector or the tabs are not wide enough these paths get abbreviated, which is what you expect, but not in a very clever way. All the tabs show the same; [C:\websites\HostRa....].

This forces me to switch off the option 'Show Full Paths', so I can see the file names again. However, this introduces a new problem; there may be several [index.html] files I am editing at the same time, which I cannot distinguish.

I can hover the mouse pointer over the tabs to see the full paths again, but this is quite slow, and doesn't tell me which file I am editing at a glance.

I would like propose a smarter way to abbreviate long paths. Why not start the abbreviation directly after [C:\]? This would leave the file names, and probably a bit more, visible most of the time. This will help me greatly finding the correct files quickly, and minimize mistakes.

It would even be better if the abbreviated paths could reflect the differences between the files that are open. For instance:

[C:\websites\HostRack Nr4\www.mynewsite.com\HTML\index.html].
[C:\websites\HostRack Nr5\www.mynewsite.com\HTML\index.html].

Would be abbreviated to:

[C:\....Nr4\w....\index.html].
[C:\....Nr5\w....\index.html].

But I do realize that this is far more complex to program than my previous suggestion.

I wanted to add my two cents on this one, in support of the OP.

My solution in 4.x was to keep the document selector floating and stretched horizontally over 1/2 or 3/4 of the bottom right of the screen, but now that's not really an option either.

I DO like the unpinned autohide version of the document selector on the side, but I agree (as was stated in another thread) that many of us are used to it being on the right, not the left. I can stretch this new version (the one on the left) out to accommodate long paths.

However, I'd love to use the other document selector menu button (also new) at the bottom, but like the OP says, it won't stretch for those of us in deep or large dev spaces. And the problem is, instead of chopping off part of the beginning of the path, it chops off the only thing that really identifies it which is the file name.

Not sure how this could be handled. Truncating and throwing ellipses into path folders that are repeated is good, but not sure how this would be implemented. One complication is that many of us edit files in a few separate places - I may have a lot of files open in within the site's root folder, but I may also have apache config files or php ini files open, which are in an entirely different place.