Tabs and Windows

Tabs and windows

Every open document is a tab. Files named on the command line each open in their own tab, so bpad a.txt b.txt c.txt gives you three.

The tab strip

A tab shows the document's filename. An unsaved change is marked, and the status bar below shows the full path and when the document was last written to disk -- not when you last typed, which is a different and less useful fact.

Right-clicking a tab gives you Close Tab, Close Other Tabs, Close All Tabs and Copy Full Path, which is the fastest way to get a path into another program.

Windows

File > New Window opens a second window with its own tabs. The two share your settings and the notes index; they do not share tabs, and closing one does not close the other.

There is no split view inside a window. Two windows side by side is the answer, and it is the one that works with the window manager you already use.

Drag and drop

Dropping a file on the window does not open it yet. This page used to call that a toolkit limitation, and it was not one: the drop reaches the application through the windowing layer beneath the toolkit, on Windows and on an X11 Linux session (ADR-0081). It is queued. On a native Wayland session it will not work even once it is built, because that layer does not report a dropped file there.

Use File > Open, Open Recent, or the command line.

What survives a restart

Open Recent does: the last ten documents, most recent first.

Open tabs do not. Starting the program gives you an empty Untitled document rather than restoring what was open. Unsaved work is a separate question and is handled by the recovery journal -- see Undo, history and recovery.

---

This page is generated from docs/user/04-tabs.md and edits made here will be overwritten. Change the source and open a pull request.