IntelliJ Editor Tab Usability vs Netbeans
Hi All,
So i've just started using IntelliJ after years of Netbeans usage, and for the most part its pretty smooth sailing, just needing the learn the different shortcuts and how code autofill differs.
However, I have to say that the way Editor Tabs show/hide/work is basically unusable for me.
In IntelliJ the closest you can get to Netbeans is 1 row of tabs, with 100 slots and when the screen is full of tabs on the 1 row, you get a dropdown arrow that shows only the tabs you CANT see
In netbeans, you get unlimited tabs, and the dropdown arrow shows you ALL open Tabs, the way netbeans does this is significantly better because you can quickly see what you have open, and what you have edited, and the list never changes,
In intelliJ, every time you change tabs, that list of open files changes because the tab row has moved to show the tab you are looking at, which means the list of files is showing a different subset every time.
This is a massive issue if you use an ultrawide monitor, because you then need to scan the width of the entire montor for tab names PLUS the changable list that appears.
In netbeans, you can just always click the arrow and click the file you want to switch too.
And, yes, I realise there are various shortcuts to open dialogs to search for files/recent files, but this doesn't help if you dont know the name of the file, or arn't sure which file you need out of the thousands that might be in a large project.
Just my 2 cents.
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Thank you for the feedback. Consider using the Settings (Preferences on macOS) | Editor | General | Editor Tabs | Sort tabs alphabetically option.
>And, yes, I realise there are various shortcuts to open dialogs to search for files/recent files, but this doesn't help if you dont know the name of the file, or arn't sure which file you need out of the thousands that might be in a large project.
Could you elaborate how is it different(better?) when you search the needed file from the opened tabs or list of hidden tabs? Note that in Recent files popup you can also quick filter files by typing the file name.
Hey Andrey,
So with netbeans, when you click to tab bar drop-down, you see every file you have open with an indicator as to if it has been edited, then you can click on any file to open it, this popup is small and in the corner of the screen.
In intellij the popup only shows files that are not visible in the tab bar, so maybe the file you want is in that little popup, but it also might be along the tab bar, meaning you need to scan the width of your entire ultrawide monitor.
The most annoying part is when you try to use this arrow in intellij and don't get the correct file the first time, because when you click the arrow the next time, the list of files will be different because the visible tabs have changed.
If the popup worked like netbeans it would be a much better user experience to use it to navigate open files because it always shows all the open files.
Thank you very much for elaborating. Indeed the popup doesn't look to be a convenient for searching a file to open. Please vote for this related request in our tracker: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-80329 I hope it gets the attention soon.
Thanks for taking the time to respond to me, I honestly think just changing that dropdown to work like netbeans does and show all files would be so much simpler and better to use, i really cant understand how the current implementation works well for anyone.