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by sheff 4483 days ago
I wish, instead of adding new features, they had a release which dealt with all the problems from previous versions.

Its generally a good product, but one thing that I find really annoying (with the Rubymine branch of the product) is the way tabs randomly reorder. It is frustrating to have to search for a tab when you have more than about 6 files open and find that it has moved to a different place.

They don't seem to have been able to fix it since 2009 ! http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-22546

5 comments

The tabs in intellij are definitely weird. I just don't really even pay attention to tabs or use them for navigating. I use keyboard commands for selecting files by name.
Ditto. Either command-shift-N to jump to the file I was, or swipe gestures on my Magic Trackpad to go forward and backward in editor history.

I rarely look for a specific tab.

command-E is also invaluable (View => Recent Files)
It would be great if they just kept all tabs on one row and shrunk them as needed. I end up relying a lot on ⌘⇧N. (I should probably map it to something shorter though.)
Yeah, I ended up moving them to the right instead, mostly so all the close icons would line up.
One thing you can do is split it into two vertical tab groups: each will hold about six to eight tabs, depending on file names (possibly more, I haven't counted).

I tend to do ctrl-shift-o to open files by name (I forget the default binding), though, unless it's to quickly swap back and forth between tabs. I am less upset about tab ordering (as we can drag to reorder), and more frustrated by it hiding tabs once you open too many.

Because the "Navigate File ..." feature is SO robust (it searches based on partials, and is pre-indexed), I almost always use that instead of browsing a project tree, which helps me use that space for more code.

I can not agree more with this! Incredibly frustrating.
I think you can get around this with the double-shift search, but that requires you to know the exact filename you're looking for.