Sublime Forum

Click a file in the sidebar to open it in the active pane?

#1

I’ve recently gotten very into Sublime Text, and it’s currently my favorite editor. There’s one bit of behavior I find annoying, though, and I was wondering if there’s a way I can reconfigure things to get the behavior I want.

When the current layout includes two or more panes and I click a file in the sidebar, if the file isn’t already open then a tab will be created for it in the active pane. If the file is already open and it has a tab in any of the panes, that tab and its pane will become active, regardless of what the active pane was before.

However, I don’t like using the tab bar in Sublime and I keep it hidden. When I click on a file in the sidebar, I want it to open in whatever the active pane is, regardless if any other pane has a tab for the file. So for example, if my layout has a left and right pane, file X has a tab in the left pane, the right pane is active, and I click file X in the sidebar, I want file X to be displayed in the right pane instead of its tab becoming active in the left pane.

I can already get any file I want in any pane I want using the “Goto anything” feature, in that when I use it to open a file, it will always open the file in the active pane, regardless of whether the file is open in any other panes. But sometimes I’d really like to be able to access files from the sidebar, especially when they have a name that’s annoying to type out.

Is there any way for me to get this behavior? Thanks in advance!

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#2

You could use something like github.com/bradleyboy/TidyTabs-Sublime to automatically close all but the current tab… then the file would never be open in another pane.
Also, I hope you’re not typing full filenames in goto anything! You can just type a couple characters.

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#3

[quote=“adzenith”]You could use something like github.com/bradleyboy/TidyTabs-Sublime to automatically close all but the current tab… then the file would never be open in another pane.
Also, I hope you’re not typing full filenames in goto anything! You can just type a couple characters.[/quote]

That would improve things a bit by making it so that if a file wasn’t already open in a pane I could use the sidebar to open it in any pane I wanted. But very often I want to edit the same file across multiple panes, and in that case it would still focus the pane that already has the file open.

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#4

Bumping – anyone else have any ideas?

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