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.
Hmm, I guess that “Windows” label should really be “Documents”, huh?
Yes! This would be a very nice feature. Hopefully you’ve sent this in as a feature request.
I sent them an email with the link – haven’t heard anything back though.
I got a nice email response from an actual human at Bare Bones. 🙂
They are apparently considering various ways to improve window management. I look forward to seeing what they come up with.
great! let’s see what happens.
Pure evil putting a edited pic like that up there.
You had me all excited then arrrgggg.
I do what I can. 😈
Amazing, I just made similar comment in the MacNN forums. However, I was crucified for suggesting BBEdit had room for improvement. When I’m coding I can have anywhere from 1-20 windows open at a time.
I am currently experimenting with XCode as a PHP editor. It’s not a good as BBEdit, but the payoff of a single window may end up pushing me in that direction permanently.
There’s a great editor for Windows called … ummm … I think PHPEd. If I were a Windows using guy, I’d be using that all the time.
I haven’t installed Panther yet, but I tend towards text editors and away from IDEs; probably because I don’t know how to use them properly.
I’ll check out PHPEd – it looks pretty cool as a PHP Dev environment.
I too, put in the same request. For the time being, use this script. It does everything above except the attachment. Assign it to a hot key. – it toggles palette windows off/on for each toggle. You can change the x & y values and palettes by tinkering with the script…
property p_list : {}
tell application “BBEdit”
if every palette is {} then
open p_list
open window list
set bounds of window list to {3, 38, 200, 700}
set bounds of every text window to {202, 38, 1033, 1000}
set bounds of glossary list to {1038, 38, 1275, 500}
set bounds of CSS palette to {1158, 520, 1275, 852}
else
set p_list to every palette
close every palette
end if
end tell
FYI – i did the above script with a 1280 x 1024 monitor in mind…
Pretty slick, I’m hooked on this already. Thanks!
chris utley, i had the same mac zealot problem on some mac irc channels.
and yes, pure evil indeed putting that graphic on the page, i was very excited as well til i read this was a photoshop fantasy.
skEdit works quite nicely in single window mode however there’s no FTP connect and panther’s built in ftp wont allow write access. why?
let’s all do our duty and email bare bones and put a fire under their arse.
BBEdit 8.0
Yay! BBEdit 8.0 has support for multiple documents within a single window!
I don’t know if my little concept had anything to do with it. I signed an NDA for them, but never heard anything after that or got any of the beta seeds.
I’ve just b…
Tabbed Everything
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