DataMystic

We plan to offer a workspace feature similar in concept to what is offered by SublimeText and other editors.

This would include
- Open filters
- Screen positions
- A new menu\ribbon to allow workspaces to be open/closed/saved.

We also believe that it should allow for filters with changes to be snapshotted as-is, without saves being committed to the filter file.
This would allow work to be resumed later, but would also have the implication that a filter may not be committed to disk unless the Save or Save All command is specifically used.
This does lead to the added benefit that TextPipe can be closed by the OS for updates without losing state - this would be reloaded the next time TextPipe starts.

The filter snapshot would likely be saved with a filename like filtername.fll.snapshot or similar, which could be removed if desired.
Loading and running a filter from the command line, shell extension etc would ignore the snapshot. It would only be loaded when the filter is open for editing.

If a filter was closed without saving changes, TextPipe would prompt for saving, and remove the snapshot if required.
If TextPipe was closed, it would silently save the workspace and the filter snapshot would also be saved.

The workspace would likely have a name of *.TextPipeWorkspace

Any feedback welcome!

As for Open Filters I presently hit windows cascade to see which filters are open. This is one of my most used commands and would love to see a hot key to activate it. Would be nice to see at a glance my open filters without having to use the cascade command.

As for filter snapshots I store and back up all my filters to a dropbox folder. That way if I screw up a filter editing it and inadvertently saving it, I can restore a previous version from dropbox. Dropbox has saved my but many a time. I assume the workspace would provide similar capabilities.

As for screen positions I've recently jogged my memory and started using ctrl-tab to jog between filters. I like to work on filters in full screen mode which hides all the other open filters. This is a bit cumbersome when I have more than three filters open at a time.

I tend to have at most three or four filters open at any one time. I'd usually only be developing one filter at a time.
The others would be open either because they perform ancillary tasks (pre/post-processing) or if they contained subfilters I wanted to copy.

Several text editors include options for Save/Load Session. Notepad++ has this feature in the File menu.
I've been using Notepad++ for almost as many years (17) as I have TextPipe, yet I can't recall ever resorting to using the feature.

In my workplace, before I retired, I used a text editor called TextPad.
If I recall correctly, that too had a similar feature. I found very little use for it.

In contrast, when I open Notepad++, I may have thirty or forty files open from various projects.
cf. When I use Firefox, I curently have over 250 tabs open!

It's a nice idea, but I think it could be a distraction for the typical user of TextPipe.

David