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A preferences option for users of the show multiple tabs option whould allow the chevron to always be displayed, regardless of the number of editors opened. The number portion of the chevron could be omitted or set to the total number of editors open. This is helpful when the significant characters of certain types are hidden because of the tab compression. While other mechanisms which exist or have been proposed attempt to address this issue--e.g, hovers which display the full file name, decreasing or removing the tab compression altogether, etc.--they do not adequately address the problem since there is no way for the UI to predict when a suffient number of characters will be displayed on each tab for the user to easily select from the tabs and having to hover over multiple tabs is annoying. Even in a senario where a user might consistently use the dropdown to pick one or two of the open files, several others may be presented in the tab area clearly enough that the user will prefer to use the tabs. Keeping the dropdown available allows the user to adapt to his environment more effectively than the environment can adapt to him.
John-Mason: as a workaround, you can use Ctrl+E to open the list of editors.
I'd vote for this. The keyboard shortcut is always available... perhaps the visual cue should be as well.
veronika, would a chevron with no numbers be consistent, what would CTabFolder do by default.
By default, no chevron should be drawn. This behaviour does not make much sense for the default CTabFolder behaviour because the default CTabFolder list popped up by the chevron only contains tabs that are not currently visible. I think if you want to always navigate by the chevron, you should consider using the single tab mode: Window -> Preferences -> Workbench -> Editors Uncheck "Show multiple editor tabs"
I'd like to see this change as it means that the user is constantly having to adapt to whether a particular editor appears in the dropdown or a tab. If the dropdown always constained all of the files and always appeared, the user would not have to check the multiple tabs before clicking the chevron. The UI is trying too hard to adapt to changes in the environment and is consequently forcing the user to adapt to changes in the ui. I do not think that unchecking "show multiple editor tabs" is sufficient here since it entails the user user loses the freedom to use the multi tab area when it makes sense to do so. Keeping both the chevron and the multiple tabs gets us back to where we were at bug 32226 / bug 31564 which many of us had been using.
I should note that when opening the drop down list (via Ctrl+e or the chevron when it is visible) in the editor tab folder, all editors are in the list so one does not need to scan the tabs first if that is not desired.
> when opening the drop down list... all editors are in the list Yes this is true, I should not have replied before testing it again. To what were you referring Veronika? Are we not using the default CTabFolder behaviour for the editor dropdown?
The default behaviour for the CTabFolder can be seen, for example, when you use a plugin manifest editor (a mulit-page editor). The editor workbook and stacked views have modified the "show list" behaviour and do not use the default CTabFolder behaviour.
Note that the chevron presented in the perspective area does not have a number. I don't believe that omitting the number for use w/ multiple tabs represents a confusing inconsistency.
one way I can see this working is if CTabFolder askes a listener whether it has anything to show in a chevron list and if so how many, and then it shows the chevron if the answer is yes for the first question.
This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet. If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it. The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is (for whatever reason) no longer relevant.
