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CSS Edit and Tabs

Posted Oct 16, 2008 in Technology and Web Design

Partly for my own reference, and partly to gather feedback from other developers, I present below an extract from an email I sent to the developer of CSSEdit, to my mind one of the finest web development tools available.

In many ways, I think the tab implementation on CSSEdit is excellent, but I have a few problems with it. Maybe there are some UI options that I haven’t seen to mitigate my problems, but I haven’t found them yet.

  1. Command-W closes the entire window, not the tab. Strictly speaking that’s probably correct but every other application that I know uses tabs maps Command-W to “close tab”. The app doesn’t also remember the existing tab-set after I frantically re-open the window.
  2. I like to have a set of related tabs grouped together – first the CSS, then the preview in the next tab along. Currently that requires a bit of manual re-arrangement to set up for a new project, as you can drop a preview tab onto a CSS file window, but not vice versa. I’d like “new preview” to consistently open to a new tab in the same window but I can’t figure out yet how to enforce that.

Have any other users of CSSEdit found ways around these problems?

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