Inspirational Technology

Windows, windows everywhere

There's one thing that absolutely drives me crazy about Mac OS X and that's the proliferation of windows. I've been using Hydra (aka #####) as my editor of choice for the last few months and the number of windows I end up with is astonishing. I've been aggressive at closing stuff and right now I still have 18 windows open in Hydra alone. Back when my machine was having to reboot every day or so it wasn't a huge problem, but now that it's finally stable I can't take it anymore. I have never understood why people think having so many windows is a good thing, but all the major Mac OS X text editors are like this. The only exception is Project Builder, which unfortunately isn't all that great as a general purpose editor.

Today I finally broke down and downloaded jEdit again. This was my editor of choice back when I used Linux all the time. When I moved to Mac OS X I stopped using it because at that point in time Java was just too slow on Mac OS X. I've looked at jEdit off and on since then and have always been annoyed by it because it's just ugly and I really wanted to use a Cocoa application as an editor since I use TextExtras. Anyway, the thing I liked about jEdit is that everything is in one window and you can have your choice of ways to manage open documents. I prefer the tabbed approach and that was what I always used on Linux. It is so much more productive then trying to find a particular window in a whole mess of windows or even finding it in the list on the window menu.

What perplexes me is that people screamed like crazy for tabs in Safari and I see constant criticism (including my own) of Omniweb because it doesn't have tabs, yet every other Mac application has a gazillion windows. This doesn't make much sense to me. If tabs are good in Safari they should be good in a text editor or any other application too. Maybe I just don't understand this particular Macism.

At least to me it seems there's a real need for a solid Cocoa editor for Mac OS X that supports good syntax highlighting, has a good plugin architecture and doesn't open a new window for every file. Project Builder could actually be good if it had a better way to access files in the file system without adding them to a project. The way it works now is good for things like Cocoa applications where you have a bunch of files that make up the project, it just doesn't work very well for writing Python scripts and such. If it could just add a file system browser along with the project browser it would probably be workable.

One thing I am curious about, is if my opinion will change once Panther is out and I can use Expose. I've been seeing comments that people are starting to use tabs in Safari less often because of this. I hope that's the case, because the current window proliferation is really unproductive and in my opinion a fairly significant flaw with the Mac experience. I wonder if I'll even be able to read the windows in Expose, I must have 60 windows open right now.