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Shells have a system menu. Double-clicking closes that shell. I would like the same behavior in the EditorPane's Tabs. The reason I want that is that it is cumbersome to close 2 or more editors, because the "X" button is at a different location for each. However, this could be confusing. Perhaps an equivalent would be to left align the X button so that as I close one editor, the next editors "X" appears in exactly the same location.
Consider as a post 2.0 enhancement
Reopen to investigate
To summarize, closing multiple files with the mouse is difficult. The reason is that the X button is never in the same place.
*** Bug 13035 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Nick, could you resolve this bug. This behavior seems even more important now that the X buttons no longer exist. I think Control+Click could still exist in addition to this more common gesture. One other thing I noticed. The tabs for stacked views cannot be closed using Control+Click.
I do not think we should support double-click on the icon to close editors and views. View titlebars and editor tabs can be much narrower than window titlebars, and overloading multiple actions on click or double-click can lead to unexpected actions. This was one of the reasons for moving the editor close box off of the tabs. People would sometimes click on a small tab to activate it, and accidentally hit the close box which pops up under the cursor. We should keep double-click for zoom only. We could consider closing a view using Ctrl+Click on its tab, which would be consistent with the editor change.
I don't think this is exactly the same as the X's. When people accidentally clicked on X's, it is because they were invisible, and single-click would cause the Editor to close. In constrast, the Tab Icon is *always* visible, and single- click (which is the bring-to-front scenario) will not cause any accidental closure. The proposal is for double-click == close. BTW, have you tried activating zoom (double-click) on the tab icon? The result is that the menu drops down, and the tab zooms, leaving the menu in a strange place.
The last point illustrates why I don't think we should overload functions in a small area. You wanted to double-click to zoom, but the icon area works differently for single click. I realize you were just trying to illustrate your point, but I still feel we should not overload double-click for close and zoom. However, I will keep it in mind as an option if people really find the close box on the right to be horrendous.
I agree with Nick that double click should not be used to close editor tabs. I didn't even realize that double clicking the shell icon closes the app in Windows. Now that I am aware of it, I don't know that I agree with it. It creates an ambituity with a double click on the shell title. Once closes the application, one maximizes it. I've never noticed a problem with finding the 'X'. I prefer it to stay at the end of each tab. It is likely because I keep my number of open editors set at 5-6. This prevents compression of the tabs and keeps them a uniform size. I can understand that the dissappearing 'X' could lead to accidental closing of the tab. Maybe the 'X' for unselected tabs could be left displayed but greyed out. BTW, I do find the new single 'X' on the far right of the editor tab line horrendous.
If a double-click is used to close the editor, the first click will activate the editor, causing flicker to occur. This is the same issue that currently exists with the ctrl-click implementation. I can not think of a way to get around the double-click issue. I do know how to get around the flicker with ctrl-click. That being said I am not too happy with ctrl-click to close, I to prefer the close boxes on each tab.
I would suggest that if double-click on the icon does not close the editor, then the pane menu should be closed as part of the zoom. Randy is correct, the current behaviour does look strange.
When you double click in the icon of a window on Windows the window is brought to the front before it is closed. i.e. it flickers a bit. I think that immitating the platform behaviour is probably what most users would expect.
We have an issue that Windows doesn't. We lazily create editors, and would like to avoid creating one just to close it.
In response to wegener, I have my threshold set to 3 Editors, and even so the Tabs are all different sizes. This is on 2.0.1, so maybe 2.1 is distributing tab space more evently. I also agree that the new X button is not great. The scope of the drop-down is the EditorPane (i.e. all Editors). But the scope of the X right next to it is the current Editor. Strange that these things have different scope. At first glance, I would expect it to close the entire "TabPane", not just the current tab. Looking at stacked Views, you get a completely different UI for the same thing. The active tab takes control of a titlebar, and that titlebar has the X on it. This is better, because the X is together with the View title. I'm not saying this is perfect (It is wasteful to display the View name twice), but it is different.
There are no plans for the UI team to work on this defect until higher priority items are addressed.
This bug is no longer relevant with the addition of a "close" button.
The alternative mechanism doesn't really invalidate this bug. The argument is for behavior consistent with the OS. The close button is annoying because it is never in the same place, even for the first tab. The good news is that I can create my own theme which does this. I've got something in the works.
