After yet one more day of doing mainly cut-and-paste programming, (some would call that 'reuse of code or just recycling ) I would once again like to suggest an option to quickly freeze/deny editing of an open window.

This could be implemented like an 'open as read only', or better still some sort of hotkey (user configurable anyway!) to toggle the protection on the fly.

Applying this toggle immediatly freezes the text in the current editor window, until 'unfrozen'. The frozen state must be stored in the environment session, such that quiting and reloading the IDE does not change the frozen state of any window.

Freezing a window prevents drag-n-drop, cut-n-paste and other accidental editing when you are recycling code from one file into another, and you really do not want to alter the original. If the files have similar names (like when you are creating a tweaked version of a otherwise generic file) you (at least I) quickly loose track which of the open files is the source and which is the target.

Currently I mark source and target by changing the file properties of the source file in the explorer window. (Windows Explorer that is, not PHPEd, as the latter does not actually perform any change to the files properties, as somebody somewhere in this forum has properly noted!) But browsing the file tree in two windows at the same time is rather annoying and error-prone (you might end up in a wrong version tree and write protect an obsolete file instead!)

Having the frozen state being indicated in the file tabs (like the modified asterisk) would also give a clear indicaton which of two identically named files is the target you are working on.

It would be a great help if at least the read-only state of a file could be changed from the PHPEd explorer window. However the proposed 'freeze window' would actually not render the file 'read only', it would just disallow any (further) modifications to that specific editor window.