Unlike VS.NET, the close box for an openned file is directly under the close box for the phped itself. The slighest mousing error and you end up exiting the whole IDE instead of just closing the file you intended to close. In the VS.NET IDE, this button is the width of the toolbards lower beside the next/previous file buttons. This is DRAMATICALLY better.

Thank you for reading.

Andrew

Ever tried Control + F4 ?
Will save you the movement of your hand from keyboard to mouse

Isn't it funny how Microsoft continues to violate the official 'look and feel' of windows, where other manufacturers are obliged to stick with it, or loose the right to carry the 'designed for windows blablabla' logo!?

Well I've got a couple of broken fingers in my right hand so it's actually quite difficult for me to chord Ctrl-F4 with one hand so I end up having to use both hands for that. So in my opinion using the mouse is as efficient or better for me.

And to the point about Microsoft, this has nothing to do with computer politics. It's a simple observation that PhpEd's UI is clearly influenced by the VS.NET one and in this case the VS.NET UI provides an example of a (IMO) better placement for the close button.

Regardless of why or how it's resolved - the placement of the this button is poor because a simple mis-click results in an application exit which I think we can all agree is both undesirable and unintended.

Andrew

Please redirect your complaint to Microsoft.

There are very many undesirable misclicks possible. Paste and Delete are quite close to each other in the Edit menu, just to name one. OK, this is undoable, but restarting PHPEd also restores its desktop quite well.

Step-Over and Step-Into in the debug menu are also quite close to each other. Now that's a real PITA! Let's put them in seperate menus!!

If you close the application too often you can always turn 'auto save files' off, and on exit, the environment will ask you to save the files. Say 'cancel' and the exit itself is cancelled.

With broken fingers in your right hand, using the mouse must be the last thing you would like to do. Actually, if you are a real programmer, you'd probably always have both hands on your keyboard, so pressing Ctrl-F4 would still be simpler than reaching for your mouse. Ofcourse, you could occasionally mistake the Ctrl for the Alt key, and off you go again...

I think you make a big fuzz of something that is actually a non-issue. Every MDI application has the close, minimize and resize buttons at the same place, it's only MS that has changed this in a few (!) of their applications, breaking away from their own standard, and curse them for that! Maybe they agree with you that, with hindsight, it was an inconvenient place where they decided to put it a couple of years ago. But then they should provide a general solution for all of us to use, and not start hacking away at one single (family of) application(s).

There are many reasons why changing the button from its default position (ie where it is put by the provided standard MDI DLL) is a bad thing. You need only think of the repercussions for 1 minute to know why. Have you forgotten the change from Windows 2.0 to 3.0, and the mess we got with these 'nice' custom dialogs that MS made for WfW 2.0 and Excel 4? Or were you not around at that time? And how about Encarta, yet another MS application that broke the GUI standard and had to deal with the consequences later. If you want a MOTIF look and feel, cause it's so much better than Windows, then you should go for unix.

Obviously the guys at MS still have not learned their lesson well. And if you do not learn from your mistakes you are destined to repeat them.

I'd advise nusphere not to tinker with the MDI interface and keep the close button where it is until MS provides a decent skin management system within their OS! Then every individual user can customize the application interface and you can give the button any size you want and put it any place you like.

But don't hold your breath for MS to get it right!

In the mean time you might try right-clicking in the text-window and select 'close' at the bottom of the context menu!

Oh, and BTW: I always hit Crtl-F4 using my left hand...

You can always right click anywhere in the open file or on the tab and choose close from the drop down options

Regarding above discussion:

Would that be of an advantage jus to place a small "x" button next to the name of each tab (namely: on the opened file tab?) - something like Firefox-style solution? Does it make sense? I use it with Firefox and it seems to be quite handful....

rgrds
Simon

That's the first thing I disabled when I installed FF2.0
I use the keyboard to switch between open sourcefiles most of the time, but sometimes I have plenty of files open and I don't like closing
one because I just happened to click 2 pixels to far to the right
Anyway guess all of that is just personal preference... If there is stuff like that to come, I hope it can be turned off