Tabs, shortcuts, two notes and one question

My remarks are pointless. I removed those posts.

The new Sierra tabs are an operating-system device for window management, shared among most applications.

To close a Tinderbox tab, mouse over the tab icon. You’ll see a ⨂ button; click it to delete the tab.

Thank you, Mark.

I hope in the future you can add an additional shortcut for closing the Tinderbox tabs.

How often do people close Tinderbox tabs?

It’s not a great idea to have keyboard shortcuts for everything. We already have shortcuts for selecting the Next Tab and the Previous Tab; do we really want a shortcut for closing the current tab?

Actually, the extra shortcut is not necessary because the OS gives us the ability to assign a shortcut to any menu item and the user can choose whether to do it or not.

The issue is that there is not an option for closing a Tinderbox tab in any of the menus and now that we have two kinds of tabs I think that would be beneficial.

Finally, I close tabs much more often than I use the Next/Previous Tab options.

I close tabs all the time, and it’s frustrating when my muscle memory hits ⌘W and the whole Tinderbox window disappears. I would love a Close Tab menu option.

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Interesting! Just as a data point on the variety of Tinderbox styles, I use the previous/next tab command roughly 1000x as often as I do “close tab.” Reason, in my case:

I set up windows with multi-tab layouts, to look at data in different ways that I prefer: Map view in one tab, an outline-agent view in another, then a couple of attribute browser views. Back in the old Tinderbox 5 era of multi-window layouts, I’d have these each in its own window, placed around the screen. Now it’s more practical for me to set them up as tab – and, for me, the point is that I set them up, and then rarely tamper with them.

(As Mark B knows, I keep experimenting with multi-window layouts in TB 7. But for whatever reason I keep encountering a “disappearing window” bug, where the multi-window layout gets boiled down to a single window, with no other damage or corruption to a file. So I’ve shifted for now to single-window/multi-tab layouts.)

I do sometimes delete a tab, but usually as part of the “incremental formalization” system of Tinderbox, when I have some new idea in mind for laying out data. I am mentioning this not to say it’s the right way, but just for compare and contrast on different approaches.

On this:

I had a variant of this issue: If I was working in a a multi-window file, hitting Cmd-W (rather than Shift-Cmd-W) would close just one single window – and in closing it would remove it altogether from the file’s layout. (There was no way to Undo that, and my recourse was to recreate the layout by hand or find an old version of the file and copy out the XML governing windows layout.)

I solved this problem with a step you might want to consider. Using the Apple SystemPreferences/Keyboard settings, I changed Cmd-W from this potentially destructive setting to something harmless. (I now have mapped it to “Save.”) FWIW.

Thank you very much, Mark for the description of your workflow with Tinderbox. I am a new user of Tinderbox and descriptions like this really help!

Simple and effective. I like it — thanks, James!

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Thanks, hope this is useful for you too. And to spell out a point that may already be obvious to you, but perhaps not to everyone, you don’t need to do the Cmd-W remapping for the system as a whole. As you probably know, you can do application-by-application specific remaps.

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Returning to this discussion from a while ago: Back at the time, I said that I hardly ever closed tabs. But as I’ve started using the very convenient facility / trick mentioned in this thread, to send notes direct to a Tinderbox Inbox from any other application, I’ve suddenly seen the potential value of having a keystroke means of closing Tinderbox tabs. That is because the Inbox technique, and a related technique mentioned today for direct links to any Tinderbox note (in this blog post), both have as collateral effects the creation of a new tab each time they are used.

Closing those tabs now requires mousing around to the very precise little corner where the tab-close icon is shown. It would be more convenient and TB-esque to allow other keyboard ways to close them. Or, to put it differently, I now see a use case for more frequent tab-closing moves. (Or, a way not to continually create surplus tabs.)

A suggestion to Mark Bernstein: if you decide to just add a menu command for closing a 2nd level Tnderbox tab maybe you could name it “Close note”.

Another approach of an app that has two levels of tabs is that of Sublime text. The cmd + W shortcut closes a 2nd level tab except in the case when there is only one 2nd level tab. In the latter case, a 1st level tab is closed as well as it is expected. The command “New Window” always opens a 1st level tab, and the command “New File” always opens a 2nd level tab.

Or how about “close tab”?

Since “note” has a specific, term-of-art meaning in Tinderbox, namely as the basic unit of info (as under the Note heading of the menu), I think a “Close note” command could be ambiguous at best and misleading at worst. I realize that “close tab” might involve confusion with the system-level Sierra tabs, but the understood reference could be to “tabs” as used elsewhere in the Tinderbox menus (“New tab” etc)

There is already a “Close Tab” command. Other ideas: “Close Note View”, “Close 2nd Level Tab”.

Serious (non catty) question: Where is this command? I haven’t been aware of a way to close TB tabs other than clicking on their corners. Will be glad to know about this if I’ve overlooked it!

I just saw this myself. There’s a thing in the view menu called “Show Tab Bar” (right at the top). This presents a second “level” of tabs. The close tab command works on that one.

As far as the tabs I’m used to – the ones that show the current note name and have a view icon – I don’t think there’s a way to close them with the keyboard.

I don’t understand the purpose of the two levels of tabs, but seeing as I’ve just learned about them, some experimenting is in order…

Hmmmm!

No doubt this is because I don’t enable the Sierra tabs (which I find an encumbrance), but it does explain why i haven’t/don’t see this command.

IF you have two levels of tabs… and these are different from the tabs you get if you “open original in new tab” or use the “+” or “new tab” functionality.

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Just happened on this thread. I also see the value of closing tabs. I often navigate through my notes by opening the original of an alias in a new tab or using URL to open a particular view of a particular note. Over time tabs accumulate and I need to close them and something like ⌘-W for TBX tabs would be very welcome.