I’ve used BBEdit for pretty much all of my coding on the Mac for a long time. It is a really great editor with a ton of great features. My only real complaint about it is the lack of a Single Window Mode.

When I work on projects, I end up with a ton of files open with each in their own window. Having this many windows open at once is difficult to manage. It is similar to using a browser that doesn’t have tabbed browsing; everything is a new window and you quickly find your workspace littered with open windows.

The text editor I use on Windows has tabs for open windows. This works fairly well but after you get 10 or so open windows, the tabs become much less useful as the tabs shrink to the point you can’t easily read the filename in the tab anymore.

I currently use BBEdit’s ‘Windows Palette’ as a means of switching between the many open windows. This approximates much of what I’d like to see, but those darn open windows are still in the way. I’d like to see a solution similar to this:

There could be a simple toggle (checkbox) on the window toolbar to easily switch between the current behavior and the proposed ‘Single Window Mode’: [x] Single Window Mode.

Having the open windows organized in this manner would make it a lot easier to switch quickly from BBEdit to an IM client, iTunes, Mail, etc. by just clicking on that app’s window instead of having to use the dock.

I hope they will consider it, I think it would improve the user experience of an already great application.