Tab disorder

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Per Johansson - 20 Oct 2006 14:07 GMT

Usually when working in the IDE, I have several tabs open. As usual in a Windows application, you can switch between the tabs using ctrl+tab and ctrl+shift+tab.

However, unlike all other applications I have used, and unlike every application that I have made, it is not the next tab to the left or to the right that gets switched to, but just any tab using some mysterious hidden tab order.

This is very annoying since I have to look carefully until the tab I want is finally opened.

Same goes for closing tabs using ctrl+f4. So I can't use it to close the five leftmost tabs quickly.

This may work as intended, but the intention of this behaviour is well beyond my imagination. Isn't it written in Microsoft Windows Design Guidelines that an application should behave predictably?

- --
Per Johanssn

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Oenone - 20 Oct 2006 16:40 GMT

> However, unlike all other applications I have used, and unlike every
> application that I have made, it is not the next tab to the left or
> to the right that gets switched to, but just any tab using some
> mysterious hidden tab order.

(I'm assuming you're using VS2005 as you didn't say in your message).

I think you'll find that it maintains the tabs in a "most recently used"
order. So if you have five tabs open in this order:

1 2 3 4 5

...and you're viewing tab 1, pressing Ctrl+Tab will switch to tab 2. While
you were holding down the Ctrl key after pressing Tab once, the windows were
listed in the pop-up that appears in the order it moves through them. After
performing a single Ctrl+Tab, the order will have been switched to:

2 1 3 4 5

If you then Ctrl+Tab through until window 5 is selected (noting that each
press of Tab moves one window down the list in the pop-up, not randomly),
you'll then have the windows in the Ctrl+Tab list ordered as:

5 2 1 3 4

Pressing Ctrl+Tab once again will switch back to window 2:

2 5 1 3 4

This is exactly the same behaviour that you get switching apps with Alt+Tab,
by the way. If you open multiple apps and then do the above steps using
Alt+Tab you'll see that the application order is handled in exactly the same
way.

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(O)enone

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Per Johansson - 23 Oct 2006 09:02 GMT

>> However, unlike all other applications I have used, and unlike every
>> application that I have made, it is not the next tab to the left or
>> to the right that gets switched to, but just any tab using some
>> mysterious hidden tab order.
>
> (I'm assuming you're using VS2005 as you didn't say in your message).

I have VS 2003 with service pack 1.

> I think you'll find that it maintains the tabs in a "most recently used"
> order. So if you have five tabs open in this order:
[quoted text clipped - 15 lines]
>
> Pressing Ctrl+Tab once again will switch back to window 2:

Hm, seems true. Problem is that I never remember in what order I was using the tabs and I don't see any visual clue about that. There's no such popup in VS 2003.

> 2 5 1 3 4
>
> This is exactly the same behaviour that you get switching apps with Alt+Tab,
> by the way. If you open multiple apps and then do the above steps using
> Alt+Tab you'll see that the application order is handled in exactly the same
> way.

I use alt+tab a lot but never understood the sorting order of the icons. But as they are usually visually different, it's less of a problem to find them.

Let's see. Do the tabs in Internet Explore 7 behave in the same way? No, they open in the order they are displayed. What about Excel worksheets? No, ctrl+pgup/pgdn also open the sheets according to displayed order. So this behaviour is certainly not omnipresent in Microsoft appplications.

Is this behaviour documented somewhere? In the MSDN documentation, ctrl+tab does a command called Window.NextDocumentWindow and there the traces end.

Is there a way to change the behaviour so documents are opened in tab order?

- --
Per Johansson

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Tab disorder

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