Re: question and/or enhancement suggestions for the IDE editor/explorer

Thomas Wolf wrote:
> 
> Ever since the multi-tier tabs in the editor have been abandoned in 4.x, 
> I've
> been exclusively using the Explorer to open & jump between files in the 
> editor
> (I frequently have several dozen files open and the alphabetic drop-down on
> the top-right of the editor becomes time-consuming to scan with that many
> files.)

Is Ctrl-Tab at all helpful for this?  Also, have you tried Alt-Shift-O?

> Anyway, since I use the explorer exlusively now, I have a couple questions
> (or suggestions for future improvement):
> 
> - Is there a way that the Explorer can highlight which files are currently
> open in the editor?  It would make it easier to locate files under edit.

Currently there's none;  Navigator does have an API for secondary 
highlighting of things, and has some promise as an Explorer replacement.

It wouldn't actually be hard to add this sort of thing into Explorer - 
it would need a small API to allow nodes to provide some sort of 
coloring info, that's about it - relatively trivial to implement.

> - Is there a way to configure the editor to entirely remove the tab area at
> the top?  Since I'm using the explorer exclusively, this is wasted real
> estate.  Ideally, there'd be a checkbox like there is for the toolbar.

No direct way;  you could write and install a custom TabControl UI for 
editor tabs that displays no tabs.  It's a string key in UIManager that 
determines what UI delegate gets used, just as with standard Swing controls.

I'd say file an enhancement request, but I suspect that so few users 
have that usage pattern that writing a patch is probably the way to go 
if you're seriously interested.  Have a look at core/swing/tabcontrol - 
you basically just want an implementation of TabbedContainerUI that does 
almost nothing - should be trivial to write.  The code that puts the 
UIManager key in UIDefaults is in core/swing/plaf/**LFCustoms

Sorry to say "hey, go write it yourself" (I don't mean it that way!), 
I'm just thinking that realistically its the sort of change that's 
appealing to so few that only someone who really wants it that way is 
going to go out and write it - I understand your reasoning for wanting 
this, but tab-less tabs are pretty non-mainstream.

> - How do I customize the package view in the Explorer?  I have several 
> dozen
> packages in my project, some of which are VERY long/deep - I think someone
> nentioned a way to set the IDE to only show the first few and last few
> characters of the package name - since that's where, most of the time, the
> differentiation happens...without such customization i either have to set
> the Explorer to be extremely wide or do horizontal scrolling to locate the
> right package.

Don't have it off the top of my head, but you can definitely find it in 
the archives of either this list or nbusers.

Hope that helps,

-Tim