Managing session with a lot of open files

dz15mlru · Feb 7, 2022, 10:44 AM

I have a lot of open files, over 200 up to 300
https://imgur.com/piZFWaM
And they - only file names - covers almost all my display, leaving little space to view the file content.
How can I deal with them, how to hide/unhide open files tabs panel, without closing them?
I really need to keep them open and unsaved, so closing them is not a sollution.

Alan Kilborn · Feb 7, 2022, 5:20 PM

@dz15mlru said in Managing session with a lot of open files:

How can I deal with them, how to hide/unhide open files tabs panel

Hide the tab bar entirely or turn off multiline:

Not sure how one deals with so many tabs mentally, but…if you can do it then good for you.

@dz15mlru said in Managing session with a lot of open files:

I really need to keep them open and unsaved

IMO this is just asking for trouble, if you care about the data.

dz15mlru · Feb 7, 2022, 5:20 PM

@alan-kilborn Mm. Thx. Probably useful options, but not for me. I need the multi-line enabled. If hiding the tab bar, I’ll need a hot key to easily toggle -show/hide the tab bar. Now I know what I need )
Is there such a hot key, or should I request one?

PeterJones · Feb 7, 2022, 5:47 PM

@dz15mlru ,

You could hide the tab bar through the option once, and assign a keyboard shortcut to the View > Document List , which gives an alternate method of navigating all the tabs you have open.

Alan Kilborn · Feb 7, 2022, 5:58 PM

Also, if you use the PythonScript plugin, there are a couple of commands that could be tied to custom keycombos:

notepad.hideTabBar()
notepad.showTabBar()

Rather than burn two available keycombos, you could write a script that will toggle, but there’s no corresponding .isTabBarVisible() function. :-(

However, you could call showTabBar in startup.py and then have a toggling script that could internally keep track of the state.

Alan Kilborn · Feb 7, 2022, 6:38 PM

@dz15mlru said in Managing session with a lot of open files:

Is there such a hot key, or should I request one?

Apparently, you requested one:

https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/11145

Alan Kilborn · Feb 7, 2022, 6:52 PM

Here’s a PythonScript called TabBarVisibilityToggle.py that will (somewhat obviously) toggle the visibility of the tab bar with each run of the script. I tied it to the single hotkey suggestion of Ctrl+Alt+Shift+t.

As indicated before, the startup state of N++ doesn’t know if the tab bar is showing or hiding, so I default to showing it with this single line in startup.py : notepad.showTabBar()

So here’s the script:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from __future__ import print_function

from Npp import *

#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

class TBVT(object):

    def __init__(self):
        self.tab_bar_visible = True

    def run(self):
        self.tab_bar_visible = not self.tab_bar_visible
        notepad.showTabBar() if self.tab_bar_visible else notepad.hideTabBar()

#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

if __name__ == '__main__':
    try:
        tbvt
    except NameError:
        tbvt = TBVT()
    tbvt.run()

dz15mlru · Feb 7, 2022, 8:03 PM

@alan-kilborn said in Managing session with a lot of open files:

Also, if you use the PythonScript plugin[…]

I am not really into these plugins with user scripts.
Thanks for you efforts!
Tried to do it.
Added notepad.showTabBar() in startup.py
Created a new script with your code.
Can’t find how to assign hotkey to a script?
Now it works from menu’s script button.

dz15mlru · Feb 7, 2022, 8:10 PM

@peterjones
Oh, I’ve forgot about Document List mode. Thanks for suggestion.

I’ll stick to this variation for a while:
Show tab bar in single line and enable Document List mode.
Not really what I wanted; I’ll wait for the reqested hot key.