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Hi. I am noticing some strange behavior in TextPad. If I have several documents open, and I try to drag a tab from one place on the tab bar to another, the other tabs get rearranged.

It is somewhat subtle, and I didn't notice it at first, but you can do a quick experiment to make it easily noticeable. Open 5 new documents. They will probably be called Document1, Document2, Document3, Document4, and Document5, from right to left. Now pick up the tab for Document5 and try to drop it between Document1 and Document2. Document2 will move all the way to the left for some reason. At least, that is what happens when I try it. Is anyone else noticing this? Is this a bug or a feature? Can it be disabled?

Elias

FWIW, I just tried your experiment and my results differ: Initially my tab order (from left to right) was 5,4,3,2,1. The Document5 tab was dragged and dropped between 1 & 2. After the drop my tab order (from left to right) is 4,3,2,5,1.

I experimented some more, and found out that if the tab is dragged straight onto the tab bar, the shuffling doesn't happen. You must drag it slightly off the tab bar, and then back on.

Well I just tried that Mike, even dragging it right out of the Textpad window then back in and to its new position; my results remain as before. I cannot make the shuffle happen. I am using Textpad 5.20 on XP service pack 2.

I also have TextPad 5.2.0, but I have XP Service Pack 3. I don't know if the service pack has anything to do with this. I tried to make an image to illustrate the issue more clearly.

Happy New Year Mike
I'm at work at the moment and so can't display your image. When I get home, where I have an XP3 system, I'll try this all again and get let you know what happens.

After having played around myself with moving tabs, feeling at first that there was some really random behaviour going on, it took a little while to realise that it's not actually random at all, though maybe a little 'unconventional'.

What's actually happening when you shift a tab along a line of tabs is that the one you move and the one at the 'destination' get swapped. (I think we're perhaps more tuned to expecting the moved tab to just drop nicely into the space between two destination tabs.)

Clearly, then, this is a feature and not a bug, and if you think of it in this way, then Mike's method of dragging the tab along the bar makes sense. What's happening here is that, though the user action is still one straight drag from start to end, the effect of going along the bar is actually a series of individual swaps. (If you drag it in this way slowly you can better see what is happening.)

I'm actually getting quite used to it now that it makes some sense.

Is there a way to disable this feature? I have been using TextPad for months and I just can't get used to it. It is different from every other tabbed interface I've used.