On Tabs, AGAIN!
I'm getting overwhelmed with emails and requests to implement Tabs for Scribes. I'm neither interested nor motivated to work on a Tabbed document interface for Scribes. I never designed Scribes with Tabs in mind. Yes, it's deliberate. Read more about it here. I'm usually very patient, but I'm tired of debating this issue. For tab lovers who insist I have to implement Tabs, I have a solution.
If you want Tabs for Scribes there are two things you can do.
The alternative is to use an editor that support tabs. Fortunately, there's no shortage of them.
C'est finis.
If you want Tabs for Scribes there are two things you can do.
- Implement Tabs and submit your patches to me. I'll accept them, I promise.
- Fund its development. Pay me to work on overhauling 50,000 lines of Scribes code to accommodate Tabs. I can work on it full time this summer (I'm currently free but not for too long). My fee is $5,000USD for the period of Jun 1st, 2007 to August 31st, 2007. If I get enough feedback, I'll put up a page showing how much people have donated towards the objective. If you are serious about this, contact me for more details.
The alternative is to use an editor that support tabs. Fortunately, there's no shortage of them.
C'est finis.
posted by Mystilleef at
7:43 AM
13 Comments:
I have to say that since reading your origninal reasoning, I have done without tabs and it is no problem. Because scribes automatically saves on closing a document, I now close them more often and reopen them when needed rather than having the clutter of lots of documents open. Reopening a document doesn't take that long if scribes is already open.
DAZ
Scribes is great. I must congratulate you on such a great forward thinking.
Please adhere to you original goals for Scribes.
Scribes should only be simple and power editing and nothing more.
I miss the project management interface for it but that's not some thing I can't compromise for great text editing features.
I humbly suggest that if you ever plan to implement a project management interface, please don't be hasty on it. It needs to be very very very well thought out, given the nature of Scribes.
Once(whenever that is) you are comfortable with the only then move ito it.
On an immediate front I thing a plugin architecture is more import. That will allow a lot of good thing to happen to Scribes.
As they say, you do not need to be big to be great, Thanks again for such a great LITTLE thing.
PS: Have you ever used TextMate. I never used a Mac, but read a lot that it is a great text editor.
There certainly is an alternative:
Abstract the distinction between "documents" and "windows" altogether. We have (approximately) three different modalities:
* Single-document interface
* Multiple-document interface
* Tabbed multiple-document interface
Each type has features that one of the others simply can't do (shared menu bars, shared taskbar buttons, tiling, etc.) But why is there a distinction in the first place? Why does the app have control over this aspect of the interface? Every app should have the individual documents and common menus abstracted, and then the WINDOW MANAGER should be the thing that combines them all together into one window, maybe putting them in an MDI, giving each a tab, tiling two groups of tabs so that multiple document are visible at once, sharing the menu bar when docs have the same menus to save screen space, etc. etc. Things should be arranged however the user wants to arrange them.
----
I tried Scribes for a while, and it has some great ideas, but autosave is useless for me without saving each subsequent revision ("revision control"?), so I've abandoned it. Never know when you're going to accidentally overwrite a file with something that you ultimately don't want, and it autosaves and destroys data. At least with gedit I can use undo and see whether the version I am looking at has been saved or not.
This should really be a feature of every app, though; every revision of a document should be saved (with "milestone" major revisions when you manually press the save button and automatic minor revisions in between), and you should be able to revert to any of those states in the same way that you would revert to a previous state with the "undo" button, regardless of whether you had "closed" the application in between. (Though in this case, what's the difference between closing and minimizing as far as the user is concerned?) :-)
(And I don't dare use it to edit system files for fear it will autosave a mistake and I won't be able to get back the original file.)
It's heading in the right direction, though.
endolith,
I don't think it is the responsibility of a text editor to function as a revision control system. I suggest you look into bzr or darcs if you need a robust and dedicated revision control system.
I don't like tabs - never have - and I routinely have 20 documents open and 40 or so windows open. Windows does an okay job of collecting them all on the taskbar except for the fact that I cannot move them into an order that I would like if I haven't opened them originally in a specific order. Or, if I restore sessions, say, of Firefox, and they appear in a different order than I had been used to them in because Windows had to reboot for an update. Well, this isn't about Windows but tabs - don't need them. But, then, I still use WordStar 6.0 in a DOS window with 50 lines because I don't have to move my hands off of the keyboard. Of course, keyboard manufacturers have moved the CTRL key so my caps lock key is now my CTRL key and no one else can use my keyboard! Well, I will try scripts and see if I can make it do exactly word star keyboard functionality. If that works, I will love the program because old wordstar can only use 8.3 form filenames!
EB
For all people that want tabs. Just use Fluxbox. Like mystilleef says: Windowmanager, not editors, should handle windows, that is what they're made for.
macco
You write very well.
I suspect after a few hours of working with Scribes that a very long journey of trying text editors has ended now, including multiple attemts to roll my own. I will brew patches if my time lets it as I'm very interested in this project. (There aren't many around with firm philosophy AND a nice icon:)
Thank you!
So just to be clear, it sounds like you're not against tabs specifically, so much as MDI in general, no? Because there are other ways of doing MDI.
For what it's worth, I'm all for abandoning tabs. I'm much more a fan of the buffer system, such as what Pyroom does. Then perhaps f9 could become the document switcher between buffers, in addition to perhaps ctrl-pgup/pgdwn.
But of course I'm not actually suggesting this, since MDI is against the Scribes philosophy. I guess I'm just trying to illustrate that perhaps your rants are actually against something more general than just tabs.
I'm against Tabs in particular. MDIs are useful in certain contexts. Especially when they are used to implement views (see Medit IDE). It is when they are used to manage documents that they become a nuisance. In such cases they are inefficient and do not scale well.
Maybe I have my terminology mixed up, but doesn't MDI refer specifically to managing multiple documents (multiple document interface)? Multiple views is something else.
9Unless you meant tabs are useful for multiple views? I apologize for my lack of reading comprehension.)
In any case, terminology aside, what I meant to ask was: are you against applications managing multiple documents in general, or just managing multiple documents via tabs? Because there are ways other than tabs for applications to manage multiple documents.
Cessen,
Sorry for the confusion. If there's a scalable and "intuitive" MDI approach to managing multiple documents, then I don't see why it can't be used.
However, I believe SDIs are better. Even Mozilla, lately, has acknowledged that tabs are a bad idea.
See what Nick had to say about using Scribes SDI document switching approach as compared to tabs.
"Today I noticed that I had 46 opened scribes documents - each in a separate window - while programming at work. Since I simply hit F9 and type in a few characters to jump to the file I completely forgot the “need” for MDIs, tabs, project managers and other “tools”."
http://nicksda.apotomo.de/2009/05/painless-text-editing-with-scribes-04-on-ubuntu/
Tabs are evil. They are just a little less evil than the CAPS LOCK key but not much less.
Seriously, less clicking and more typing is always a good thing while programming. Anything that makes one of your hand go away of the keyboard (to move the cursor or click something using the mouse) hurt your productivity and its distracting.
Looking forward for Scribes 0.4!
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