[texworks] Tabs in the future?

[Jérome Laurens]

Le 3 sept. 08 à 08:04, Joseph Wright a écrit :

> niels van everdinck wrote:
>>
>> But it's always very good to see an initiative like this, thanks  
>> for the
>> package Martin. For a pre alpha release TeXworks looks more than
>> promising, nice job!
>
> I'd agree.  It looks good already.
>
>> Just one question/request: are there going to be tabs in the text
>> editor?
>
> I'm not sure this fits with the design idea of the program.  I'd  
> imagine
> of the MacOS using the Dock is preferred for switching between
> documents, on Windows, we have the taskbar, and so on.  That said, I
> think I'd personally like tabs as it is how I'm used to working in  
> WinEdt.
> -- 
> Joseph Wright
>

Hi,

tabs definitely make sense but they can come in different flavours and  
they must be adapted to texworks design.

There are 3 kinds of tex documents, the single, the compound and the  
complex ones.
A single TeX document only contains one TeX file.
A compound TeX document contains one master TeX file that includes  
many different TeX files.
All other cases are complex TeX documents.
Here the auxiliary files are not considered as real part of the  
document.

A user will have many text windows open at the same time either when  
different TeX documents are edited
or when different TeX files of the same TeX document are edited.
Tqbs will be suitable for the latter but not really for the former.

Concerning the UI, XCode implementation of tabs is very efficient:
1 - switching from one tab view to the other is made through a menu  
and not the standard list of buttons
2 - text windows can be splitted in order to display different text  
files or different parts of the same text.

Finally, I would say that Tabs should be implemented with splitting  
views, and for multipart TeX documents only