Is there any way to stop a Tab from being closed WITHOUT locking it?

[John . Smith]

Hello 

Is there any way to stop a Tab from being closed WITHOUT locking it?

Background

If you are changing between Tabs by clicking on Tab names, it's all too easy to accidentally click on the little (x) at the right of each tab and thereby close the tab by mistake.

One way to stop this happening is to tick "Lock default in this tab". However, if you do this it becomes impossible to change your filtering on a temporary basis, and if you try to do so MLO will instantly create a new Tab and take you there. And if you're not careful, pretty soon you have far too many Tabs. 

e.g. I find it quite useful to open up a Tab and leave the filters on the left pane on the screen open and to step through the Contexts one at a time (e.g. by using the arrow keys).

This works well, but if you don't want to be awash with new Tabs, (as above) you should only do this if your tab is NOT locked. And if it IS unlocked then (as above) it is annoyingly easy to accidentally close the Tab. If you have saved the View that your Tab is using then you can, of course, recreate the Tab as it was, but it's a fiddly, confusing, waste of time to do so.

J

[KC]

Hi there,

Pin the tabs and then the little (x) will be gone, the tabs will become a smaller size but my experience is that this way will serve your purpose.

Regards,

KC

[John . Smith]

OK but how do you come with the fact that when the tabs are pinned you can no longer see their names?

J

[KC]

Hi there,

It seemed to me that you can still refer to filter names on the left pane, but in my case, I have just a few pinned tabs and I use icons to help me to distinguish them, not a perfect solution, but it works for me so far.

[John . Smith]

Hi KC

To get clear, no, the left pane shows VIEW name, not actual TAB's (AKA Workarea) names.

Yes, if you pin the Tabs and if you also give them a suitable icon that does stop you from closing them accidentally and yes, it's not a bad solution.
The advantage of having a dedicated tab for each of your views is that you can easily step through them using hotkeys Control/PgUp and Control/Pg/Dn. However I am unaware of any hotkey way to step through different views from within one Tab.

J

[KC]

Hi there,

I am not sure if this helps, but I can scroll through all tabs by clicking the middle wheel of my mouse, hope this help.

[John . Smith]

> I am not sure if this helps, but I can scroll through all tabs by clicking the middle wheel of my mouse, hope this help.

Really? How do you mean are you scrolling through them or clicking through them?

Either way the keyboard shortcuts Control/PgUp  and Control/PgDN work very well for going through them in sequence... (much like going through MS Excel sheets)

But it doesn't solve my core problem which is that sometimes I want to go DIRECTLY to a tab whose name I can see, and at that point (unless I have a hotkey setup for that exact Tab) I would tend to left click with a mouse. And if I click on (x) by mistake there is NO recovery!

J 

[KC]

>Really? How do you mean are you scrolling through them or clicking through them?

In my case, I click the mouse middle wheel button, the view will shift to next on the right side.

>.... would tend to left click with a mouse. And if I click on (x) by mistake there is NO recovery!

You need to consider "customized icon", just create some 15x15 pixles JPG and put some tiny texts in there, and covert them into ico extension file via online converter web app, and then add some customized icons into the pinned tab...., hope this help.

[John . Smith]

Middle-mouse click does nothing on my system (Logitech M705)

Yes I am using Icons a lot for working out which Contexts I've got set. This is extremely fiddly to set up but once done it works brilliantly. It has been something of a revolution in fact!  (FWIW, if you are interested it's set up in the Automatic Formatting Rules - and what's particularly nice is that you can choose which column position each Icon will appear in.)

J 

[KC]

Hi J,

I had been using an App(X-Mouse Button Control) to custom-design my mouse behavior(sending out Crtl+Tag when I click mouse middle button), I forget about this because I did this too long ago, that is why your middle mouse button does not work like mine.  Sorry for any confusion that I caused.

Regards,

KC

[John . Smith]

No problem. I didn't know about Control+Tab. I just use Control+Pageup (or PageDown) to change tab, as it is the same as MS Excel so easy for me to remember.

J