Should "Close Tabs to the Left" / "Close Tabs to the Right" use the visual order instead of the logical order?

[r-mennig]

Eclipse offers the option to stack multiple editors, reusing the visual editing space for each editor. This represents each editor as a tab in a toolbar. To reduce the visual clutter when working with many editors, the context menu offers options to close all tabs to the left or right of the currently selected tab.

If all tabs in the stack fit into the toolbar, these options behave "visually consistent", e.g. the left-most tab only shows the "Close Tabs to the Right" entry and the right-most tab only shows the "Close Tabs to the Left" entry.

If the toolbar is resized, tabs which don't fit anymore are moved into an overflow menu on the right. This is done by keeping the tabs for the most recently used editors.

Consider we've stacked 7 editors (named A to G in this example), then selected D->E->F->G and afterwards resized the toolbar to only fit 4 tabs, the toolbar shows the editors D to G from left to right.

However, if we now open the context menu for the D tab, we can see that the options for closing editors to left is still shown:

Pressing "Close Tabs to the Left" closes the editors A, B and C although they are not shown to the left anymore (if anything, they can be "visually" though of as being inside the overflow menu on the right).

Closing A, B and C here is logically consistent, considering we did not re-arrange any tabs, but due to the toolbar showing the MRU order instead of the "original" order, this is not visually consistent anymore.

Other IDEs / editors (like Visual Studio Code or IntelliJ for example) avoid this problem by not reordering tabs by most recently used order

So the question I want to ask is: Is the current behavior correct/useful/easier to understand or should the closing of tabs consider the order in which the tabs are shown to the user?

[deepika-u]

However, if we now open the context menu for the D tab, we can see that the options for closing editors to left is still shown

Here your action of minimize/maximize is only restricting the (room available for) the number of tabs being shown on the editor list but it is not changing the order of tabs as such. So is the option "Close Tabs to the Left" meaningful here.

Assume if you are right. D, E, F, G are open as per the 2nd screenshot. What does the option "Close All" mean just close D, E, F, G? or close all the opened tabs including A, B, C? we dont have another option as "Close All Visible Tabs" as well. So basically visibility wont change the order is 1st thing, secondly MRU is the list by which we show the number of tabs on the editor space.

I hope this answers your question, thanks in advance.

[r-mennig]

Thanks for the quick response! You're right, the visibility does not change the (logical) order of tabs, which I think is quite misleading if we're talking about tabs being left or right to other tabs and not all tabs are visible to the user.

Im my example, I've actively shrunk the editor space to show the overview menu, so the user still knows the original order in which the tabs were opened. But since the new editor space size is persisted when saving, what happens if we restart the IDE now?

If I open the editors A to G in order and restart the IDE, I see the three left-most tabs (A,B,C) and the right-most tab (G).

In this example, knowing the order of the tabs is simple since I've named them accordingly. This is not the case for the usual case, in which the file names do not imply any order (link MyFeatureA, TestXYZ, etc.).

How would a user now know that pressing "Close Tabs to the Left" on the G tab also closes the tabs D, E and F which are not visible? This only gets more confusing if we also open the editor for F.

Now, pressing "Close Tabs to the Left" on F closes the editor A to E. Pressing "Close Tabs to the Left" on B however only closes A. So a user needs to remember in which order the tabs were opened the last time the IDE was used (which I don't think is reasonable).