Sublime Forum

[Mac] Different Tabbing when open files through finder

#1

Hello,
I’ve recently started using ST3 with my new macbook air, and I’ve found that I experience inconsistent behavior in how sublime displays tabs for the files depending on how I open the files. If I open them through sublime, I get the normal tabbed interface (picture 1 in the attached imgur link), but if I open a file through finder, it makes the currently focused tab on sublime the root of a new, larger tab, makes all non-focused windows children of that tab, and opens the new file in a new tab of the larger size (I know this is confusing, I’ve attached pictures to make it clearer).

Anyone know why this is happening, or how to disable it?

Thanks!!

[Album] Two-tiered tabbing in sublime

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#2

In short, the version of MacOS you’re using has a feature that blends multiple windows from the same application together into one window by creating a tabbed interface at the top of it (your second picture).

This forum post provides a bit more information on this as well as a link to an Apple knowledge base article that will tell you how to turn the feature off.

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#3

Ahh. I’m new to Macs (always been a windows guy), so I didn’t realize that this was a mac feature, rather than a sublime feature. Thanks for the quick response! So then, I guess the followup question I have is:

If I understand you correctly, disabling this feature will cause opening a file through finder to open the file in a completely new sublime window. If this is the case, is there a way to have sublime open these files as a new tab rather then a new window?

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#4

There is indeed; you want to change the state of this setting in your preferences:

// OS X only: When files are opened from finder, or by dragging onto the
// dock icon, this controls if a new window is created or not.
"open_files_in_new_window": true,

As seen here it defaults to being turned on because the standard on MacOS is that every open file should be contained in it’s own window; or at least it was until recently when Apple introduced the ability to blend multiple windows into one. :wink:

You might want to check the settings for other OSX specific settings such as this one as you might want to tweak them as well. For example, close_windows_when_empty defaults to false in general but true on MacOS, which will make your windows go away when you close the last file inside of them. That plays nicely with the idea of files always being opened in new windows but can lead to unexpected behaviour otherwise,

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#5

Aha! That was it! I was initially confused because the behavior didn’t happen in other apps on my mac, which made me thing it was sublime, but the behavior didn’t happen in sublime on my windows machines, which made me think it was OSX. Turns out, it was both.

Thanks so much for the help! Perhaps I should read the patch notes for the last few releases of OSX more carefully, so I’m more up to date on OSX’s design language.

Thanks again, and have a nice day!

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