Why doesn't a tab close return you to tab most recently worked in? [Part 2]

Scott Sumner

This is a locked topic (not sure how/why a thread gets locked):
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/14146/why-doesn-t-a-tab-close-return-you-to-tab-most-recently-worked-in

But I want to say more! So here’s “Part 2”:

@gstavi said:

If you want to build Notepad++…here is a patch…: Use-MRU-when-choosing-new-file-to-activate-after-clo.patch

@gstavi, this is a brilliant patch (I built Notepad++ with it and tried it out). With it, Notepad++ activates the most recently accessed editor tab when another is closed instead of the simple choice–the rightmost tab. This has bugged me in a minor way for a long time, but now that I see this patch in action I think the unpatched behavior is going to be ever-more irritating. Can anyone object to this?

@gstavi, are you willing to do a pull-request for this? It is yours after all…

Claudia Frank

I would vote for a change which is disabled per default.
Meaning having a additional checkbox in Tab Bar settings which allows activating it.
This should reduce the risk that users who are used to the common behavior are getting confused.

Cheers
Claudia

gstavi

It is tied to the Enable MRU Behaviour of Ctrl+TAB. One may argue that it is enough.

gstavi

Pull request is difficult for me at the moment.
I didn’t build latest NPP version for a long time. I have very little access to Windows machines these days. Establishing build environment (namely Visual Studio) for latest version of NPP in order to test the patch prior to pull request will be time consuming.

If @Scott-Sumner or anyone else can to the pull request for me it will be quicker.

Scott Sumner

I misspoke earlier when I said the “rightmost” tab gets activated when any other tab is closed. I should have said “tab to the right of the closing tab”. Unless of course it is the rightmost tab that gets closed in which case it is the tab to the left (now the rightmost!) that is made active.

Anyway this is an open issue since September of 2015: Closing a file should activate the most recently used document