When using ctrl+click on a file, the editor is opened in a new browser tab.
The difference between a new tab in the browser and a new tab in the IDE is very little: you still need to switch tab and you still can’t see them both at the same time.
The advantage of having a new browser tab rather than a new IDE tab is that I can detach the browser tab and put the two tabs side by side. This is a huge awesome wonderful advantage, but that’s a manual operation that requires a manual mouse drag.
I would like one change in the ctrl+click behavior and one new feature in the quick switcher:
- The ctrl+click should open the new editor in a new window rather than in a new tab, so I could use the keyboard shortcuts to see all the editors side by side without using the mouse. Win+arrow moves the new window to different monitors or to different monitor quadrants, Alt+tab cycles the focus, Win+tab shows all the editors, etc.
- The quick switcher (ctrl+P) should allow to open an editor in a new window. For example enter could open a new tab in the current IDE, while shift+enter could open the editor in a new window.
EDIT
- Using ctrl+click seems to be the only way to open the editor in a new tab. Having keyboard shortcuts and mouse click modifiers improves the user experience, but is not intuitive. It would be nicer to have an “Open in new tab (ctrl+click)” context menu item.
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I like the idea, but just one suggestion:
Instead of changing Ctrl+click’s behavior, add the shift+click shortcut to open in a new window – this would keep parity with these two shortcuts when clicking links.
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Have you tried shift clicking the run button (after opening in a new tab)?
It actually works already…
Seems to be built in to most browsers
(tested on chrome/safari on mac os)
In Chrome on Windows ctrl+click and shift+click do open link targets on new tab and new window respectively. I just tried with one of my non-Anvil apps, and it works as expected.
But on the tree in the Anvil IDE only ctrl+click works as expected, while shift+click works like a normal click.
That was the bad news. The good news is that I can press ctrl+L and shift+enter to open the current URL into a new window, then I have two IDEs on the same app in two windows, and I can take it from there.
At first I thought that the two tabs/windows would talk to each other (one see the changes of the other) only if the latter was opened with the ctrl+click shortcut on the former. I thought that there was one main IDE tab and other tabs connected to that main tab would allow to edit one file.
But now that I know that the new feature is not a smart ctrl+click shortcut, rather the ctrl+click shortcut is just a nice side effect of a more general “it is now possible to concurrently edit the same app from multiple IDEs”, then this FR makes no sense.
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