I’m not sure when this change happened. I took a few months away from developing earlier this year and when I came back to it on a new machine with an updated version of ST3 I noticed a behavior that seemed odd at the time but has become extremely troublesome in my workflow (and we all know this awesome tool is all about workflow!).
When I use Ctrl+p to open files (ingrained in my fingers from years of heavy reliance) the behavior is no longer what I expect. I’ll type in a few characters looking for the file and immediately the first file on the list opens. It used to open in a sort of “preview” mode where if I scrolled up and down on that list other files would replace that tab.
But now the tabs all stick around. As I type in the file name, every time a list of suggestions comes back at least 1 new file gets opened. After a few days (hours?) of development I can have hundreds or even thousands of files open that I never edited or even had any intention of reading, and they all have to be closed manually. Many of these files will present dialogs on close (say, if the directory has since been removed) so it’s not simply a matter of running ctrl+alt+p File: Close All and walking away. I still need to respond to potentially hundreds of dialog boxes.
My machine has 32GB of RAM so I haven’t really noticed any speed hits from it other than within my workflow, but I’m sure on any of my other weaker machines it would struggle just to have all those files open. When I run top ST3 is usually the top consumer of resources, which is something I’ve never experienced before.
I’ve googled for quite a while and haven’t seen anyone else bring up this issue. I’ve examined the entire Settings file and none of the settings there seem to fit this issue. There is a setting called “preview_on_click” that is set to true (I’ve tried setting it to false with no luck) but the description of the behavior for that isn’t what I’m getting in the app either. It says that if it’s set to true a single click on a file in the sidebar will preview a file as I described above, while a double click will fully open the file. But for me, a single click or a double click both fully open the file — there is no difference in functionality between the two. I have a feeling that this is a related issue, as though the “preview” functionality is just defaulting to a full open.
So what gives? Has anyone else had this issue? If this were the intended functionality, it’d be working quite flawlessly so I doubt no one else has noticed.
Thanks in advance