Quote:
Originally Posted by Vintage Season
Valloric, I may not have been clear in my earlier suggestion.
Going back to the example you used, of office suites with which almost everyone is familiar—and which have universally interchangeable shortcuts that quite a few people use as second nature!—here are the menu options and shortcuts to which I am accustomed in OpenOffice Writer, on a Windows machine (see screenshot attachment).
That said, Sigil is your program... and an excellent tool. If you choose to implement a few additional shortcuts and menu items, a lot of us will be happy. If you don't, none of us will suffer.
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Yes, I see what you mean. Word and Writer behave in the Mac style, "emulated MDI" system on all platforms. Even when the user opens several documents, he actually has several SDI main windows, but there's only one instance (process) of Word or Writer running.
This has both advantages and disadvantages. I'm pretty sure that the primary reason why they are choosing this route is to conserve RAM. Since Word 2010 will takes up ~80MB on my machine with both one and five (empty) documents open, the advantage is clear. Having several smaller documents open amortizes the "upfront" memory cost.
The disadvantage is that if one of those documents does something that makes the process hang, all the documents go down with it. This is not a problem for Word and Writer which are large, stable applications with teams of people working on them. Their general application stability is usually more than respectable.
Sadly, Sigil is not there yet, as any regular user will tell you
. It can crash or hang (although now much less frequently than it used to). The benefit of preserving the other documents when one goes down is substantial.
Also, the memory advantage of the single process approach is minimal with Sigil. On my main machine, Sigil eats 15MB at idle. Opening more tabs adds more memory, but the "static" amount is still just 15MB.
Thus, it is more beneficial to preserve the current single process system than to adopt the Word/Writer one.
As such, a "Close" command does not make sense. Word/Writer use it to differentiate between closing the
current document, and closing the application (which is "Exit") and all documents with it. In Sigil, you can only close the the current document, and this is called "Exit" since it also exits the application.
[All of this relates only to Windows/Linux. As I've explained, Sigil behaves differently on Macs because it has no choice. I'd use the Win/Lin approach there too if I could.]