Description Adam Roth 2013-01-11 02:35:00 EST

I know that for whatever reason MRU tab ordering is now disabled by default.  That caused me a great deal of frustration until I found a post describing how to get it back (by switching to the "Classic" theme, which really isn't that intuitive of a solution when you think about it).  While I'm glad it's back, I think there's a better way to implement the MRU logic.

First, some background about how I work with Eclipse.  I keep a lot of projects in my workspace, like at least two dozen or more.  I open files in the editor, and I almost *never* close them.  The little button that counts the number of open editor documents *always* says "99" in my copy of Eclipse.  Although I move between different projects often over time, on any given day my work is largely contained within just one or two projects; or in other words, it's fairly well localized.  

MRU is important to me, because it's the only effective way for me to quickly navigate back and forth between files.  It keeps the stuff that I'm working on visible in the editor, so that I don't generally need to go hunt it down in the package explorer.  Having MRU disabled by default was quite painful, as it tended to leave the tab for the thing that I *just* stopped working on completely outside of the visible tab list, making it impossible to jump around between files effectively.  In my opinion having an editor that allows me to quickly move between the stuff I've been working on most recently is critical.

Anyways, my suggestion for improving the MRU ordering is as follows:

1.  Whenever I open a document by clicking in the project navigator, it should appear as the leftmost tab in the editor.  

2.  The above behavior applies whether or not the selected document was already open as a tab (if already open, its old position in the list of tabs is abandoned).

3.  If I manually relocate a tab its position and MRU ranking are updated accordingly (as well as the positions/rankings of any displaced tabs); however new tabs will still always open in the leftmost position, and tabs that are now behind the moved tab will be placed in front of it (in the leftmost slot) if/when they are reopened.  The manually positioned tab will be move to the leftmost spot if it is reopened through the project navigator.

4.  Switching between visible tabs in the editor (i.e. without using the project navigator) does not affect their ordering or MRU ranking.

I think this is mostly an inversion of the current MRU approach, which seems to always open new documents in the rightmost spot (which is counter-intuitive to me; content reads left-to-right, not right-to left) and which seems to reopen existing  documents in semi-arbitrary locations (when they are not currently visible in the current set of tab items).  My feeling is that the consistency/predictability of the revised approach will make the feature much more usable.