[Feature] Tabless editing

[tychedelia]

Check for existing issues

• Completed

Describe the feature

I'd like to propose this feature as a roll up of a few different existing issues. Basically, the idea is to support a kind of workflow that's well supported in IntelliJ, which is to hide tabs and work only on a stack of recently opened files.

Basically, the workflow is that I never want to look at the file tree, don't want to see what tabs are open. Instead I want to only use search dialogs to access my "stack" of currently opened files. This helps reduce visual clutter but also is a good keyboard first workflow.

I believe this could be implemented as a combination of QoL fixes that benefit all users, as well as some new UI elements. Not all of these are necessary, but the missing accumulation of such unfortunately makes it impossible for me to use Zed instead of IntelliJ. 😭

There's a few outstanding changes and features that would accomplish this:

• Select the 2nd item by default in the file finder to allow quickly switching between files.
• Add option to hide tabs.
• Allow currently open pseudo-files (terminal, etc) to be searched for.
• Implement recent file finder that is distinct from file finder. This is important, e.g., in a rust project that has hundreds of mod.rs files, the recent file view narrows this to only "open" files, allowing better auto-completion.
• Implement a recent location finder. Beyond recent files, this allows the user to store a stack of recent edited locations, allowing quickly jumping between even locations in the same file.

Existing issues:

• Recently open files palette #4663
• Hide certain visual elements #4963

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help present your vision of the feature

[JosephTLyons]

Linking this related issue:

• Hide certain visual elements #4963

[samuelcotterall]

Select the 2nd item by default in the file finder to allow quickly switching between files.

Whilst I’m not so concerned with “visual clutter”, I’d appreciate this behaviour. My expectation is to hit cmd + p, then enter to open the previous file.

I’ve never used IntelliJ, but I’m familiar with this feature from Sublime Text and have since reproduced it in VSCode (as described in #4663).

[tychedelia]

Select the 2nd item by default in the file finder to allow quickly switching between files.

Whilst I’m not so concerned with “visual clutter”, I’d appreciate this behaviour. My expectation is to hit cmd + p, then enter to open the previous file.

Yes! This is my biggest blocker right now too.

[alygin]

Related conversation in a PR (thanks to @JosephTLyons):

• feat(workspace): allow hiding tab bar #2742 (comment)

[net]

Many thanks for shipping tab bar hiding ❤️

File tabs should be a relic of the past. Vim and Emacs had this one correct from the start.