Equal-width editor columns

In Sublime Text, I have layouts saved that let me easily switch between different ones like 1 column, 2 columns, 3 columns, etc. When switching to a new layout, the resulting editor columns have equal width.

In PyCharm, if I have a 2-column editor view and I want 3 columns, for instance, I have to split one of the columns, giving me widths of e.g. 50%-25%-25% after the split. This is almost never what I want.

(Generally speaking, I think the splitting mechanism to be better suited for a terminal rather than an editor.)

Case in point: If my text files all have line lengths of ~100 characters and my screen can fit 300 characters across, when going from 2 to 3 columns it makes sense to go from 150-150 to 100-100-100, not to 150-75-75.

Is there any way to make the current number of editor columns the same width, preferably using a keyboard shortcut? It's very tedious to manually resize the columns after adding or removing a split.

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5 comments

Bumping this as well... It's been an extremely frustrating experience. The natural expectation is that it would do equal width splits, unless otherwise specified. This is the behavior you see both old and new (vim, iterm2, vscode, etc)

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I think this is a relevant usability problem, but haven't found a ticket for this in our issue tracker. 

Feel free to submit one - https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues

I think it should be marked as usability problem.

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Ah well, I went and submitted it myself because I agree with you: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-231376

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Hello,

for everybody landing here from a Google search, this feature is now available, as explained in the comments of https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-231376.

> The feature will be available in Advances Settings > Editor Tabs > "Equalize proportions in nested splits"

 

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Yes, well, as of 2023.2.1, I have this option checked, but with a 3 editor layout, double-clicking to maximize and again to restore still yields a 50-25-25 split.  There is an open issue for this.  Give it an upvote if this feature is important to you.
 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-324584/Normalize-splits-action-ignores-Equalize-proportions-in-nested-splits-setting
 

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