On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 10:19 AM, Esteban A. Maringolo <emaring...@gmail.com
> wrote:

>
> Regarding a tab based environment, Dolphin X6 also included that in a
> concept called "Idea Space", you can open as many idea spaces as you want,
> and as you browse classes, inspect objects or look for references, all the
> usual new windows will open inside the idea space where the command was
> issued. There also was the option to save the open tabs, to restore them
> later. And you could move between tabs using only the keyboard; in fact you
> could do everything without a mouse.
>

For the record, I find tabs to be almost as much of a UI dead-end as myriad
windows. They are often incompatible with the need to see several things at
once, and they become unmanageable past a dozen or so.

Personally I prefer environments where the number of windows/tabs/buffers
is a non-issue, something managed by the environment. All I care about is:

a) Navigating back and forth between the thing I'm looking at now and the
last ~10 things I looked at; and
b) Quickly finding and foregrounding new things by whatever searchable
aspect I can remember about them.

I don't want to think or care about how many old things I once looked at
the environment keeps open; it is welcome to manage that on its own.

Incidentally, this is exactly what it's like to use RubyMine with tabs
turned off. I can navigate backwards and forwards through history, and I
can find things by name, and it worries about how many buffers to keep open
in the background. If I go "back" to a buffer it has closed, it re-opens it.

This is complemented by the fact that it auto-saves. Having high-quality
"Undo" is far more important than manually controlling when things are
saved, in my experience. In the RubyMine case, it is able to visually show
and undo every change that has been made since the last Git commit.

--
Avdi Grimm
http://avdi.org

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