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I think this was brought up for 3.6 but ignored. IMHO if you click Close on the output window top component, it should have the effect of closing (discarding) all of its tabs and also the top component. Ctrl-4 (Window -> Output Window) should then be disabled until you do something that causes a new tab to be opened.
Please don't remove the tabs after closing the output window. It would be much better to not grow the number of output tabs if not needed - and it seems in most cases it really is not needed. And definitely don't disable the menu item. All menu items opening windows have to be enabled - the user can change the layout of windows not waiting for the right conditions of window menu items enabled.
Re. "don't remove the tabs" - why not? If you closed the window, isn't that a pretty good sign you don't care about the contents any more? Re. "don't disable the menu item" - why would you want to rearrange a window which isn't even showing right now? This doesn't make any sense IMHO. BTW I feel the same about Search Results - why on earth would you ever want to open an empty search results window? And why is the window left open (empty and useless) after restarting the IDE?
Closing a window might be a sign you don't want to use its contents, but it doesn't always mean it. I think what you are trying to solve here is the tab proliferation problem. I don't know how other IDEs solve it, but would you believe or not they only have one output window without nested tabs. And if they close the window and open it again it shows the previous output (the same is true for search results). So, we should rather solve the problem with opening multiple (useless) tabs. The window menu items are used for opening windows. Wouldn't it be strange if a menu item is disabled when its window is closed and enabled when its window is open? The real problem is that you want to clear the results in search window when you close it. Don't do it and don't disable the menu items, that is the right solution. Re. "open empty and useless window after restart" - An ideal state is that when you close your IDE and run it again then it looks extactly the same way as it looked before you closed it. This helps you to get much quickly to the state of your work when it was interrupted.
I have to agree with Jesse - when you close the OW window then you don't care about tabs inside no more IMHO. (the same for VCS output) Why don't make the OW a sliding window - it hides when you don't need it and when you close it then it can close all tabs too. It's probably different story when user's 'closing IDE' - I'd prefer to get exactly to the same state as before closing after re-start.
The problem is not so much tab proliferation as having a concept of transient content, which does not persist. Output is one such thing, search results are another example. These are things which have a short lifetime, and are not useful beyond that lifetime. It is incredibly annoying that if I have searched for anything, ever, the Search Results window will be permanently opened every time I restart, *with nothing in it*. It is a component you can do absolutely nothing with, until you search for something again - it's just there taking up space. This is not doing our users any favor, it just looks like the IDE is brain damaged. And the right answer is absolutely not to make search results survive a restart - it is transient information which is useful only for a limited period of time. The same is true of output - it is useful when you do a build or a run and need to see it. As soon as you have made any change in the code that produced the output, it's not useful anymore until you do another run. Think of it this way: Imagine you are just running Windows. You forgot what folder you put a presentation in, so you use Windows Explorer's search function to find it. Now you shut down Windows. The next time you restart, and every time after that, there is an empty Search Results window on your desktop - or there is a Search Results window with the old results on your desktop. Is this at all helpful? Or imagine you're using a couple command line windows on Windows. You shut Windows down. You go on vacation for a week. On restart, your command line windows are back, with the history text in them. Do you care about this stuff? Is Windows helping you by doing this? No, it's just annoying stuff you have to close, because you probably don't even remember what you were doing in enough detail to get some value out of it. The problem is not tab proliferation. The problem is how to avoid permanently displaying irrelevant info. There are some user tasks which are one-shot tasks which produce some information that stops being relevant afterward. Note also that the new output window has a Save As function (no more incomprehensible "Start redirection to a directory you'll never find"), so if the information is really important, it's possible to save it. BTW, I don't know what IDEA does with its output window, since I haven't used it to build, but it even goes so far as to quietly close editors that haven't been used in a while, so you never have more than a fixed number of files open. I've seen no complaints about this behavior, which is much more dramatic than quietly closing output tabs. I don't care so much about disabling the Output Window menu item - leave it enabled, and if the user wants to show an empty output window, they can do that. Fine. But we *should* throw away all the tabs which are no longer being written to when it's closed, which is the subject of this issue. Output is transient information. If a module is using the output window to display information that is non-transient, that module needs to be fixed, not the output window (and I don't know of any modules that do this anyway).
I think Tim put it well. I have to strongly disagree with Jano on this one. The tab proliferation problem is unrelated. If I close the OW it's because I've looked at the contents, done whatever I need to do with them (corrected errors etc.), and now don't care about it any more and want it out of the way. Especially if we have sliding windows - then sliding the OW out of the way would mean I still want to look at it soon (though I would rarely actually do this), and closing it means it is junk. Re. the usefulness of Ctrl-4 - as far as I'm concerned this action has one and only one use: when the OW is open and you want to give focus to it so you can navigate around in it via KB. (Actually it doesn't work at all anyway, but that's a separate A11Y bug.) The Window menu item is completely useless under all circumstances, IMHO, except that it provides a convenient place to remind users of the Ctrl-4 accelerator. I'm marking WONTFIX since it is clear there is basic disagreement on how things should work here. <unrelated-rant> Re. "An ideal state is that when you close your IDE and run it again then it looks exactly the same way as it looked before you closed it." - not for me it isn't, don't know about others. The ideal state is that I open the IDE and it's clear of debris and ready for work. Some things are appropriate to retain from the previous session, e.g. list of open projects; some things (search results, expanded nodes, even sometimes editor windows) are just annoying. If I was interrupted by something and wanted to return to the exact same place afterwards, I wouldn't close the IDE to begin with. (If it dies from some deadlock or something, which is more common in my experience than explicitly closing it, the previous state isn't restored properly anyway.) </unrelated-rant>
closed
moving terminal emulator issues to terminalemulator component. To see the correct version and target milestone of this issue look at Issue Activity table.