Too many tabs? Go vertical!

If you're a bit like me, you now have about 20 tabs open in your browser. Let's not go into the psychological reasons for that, but it probably have something to do with a very short attention span.

I found this cool Firefox extension which changed my browsing experience. It's called "Tab Tree Style" and it shows the tab headers on the left side rather than on top. The result: I can have more tabs and easily see all of them at a glance. Navigating between the tabs is easier than ever and I get full size tab headers, so if a site shows information in the header I can see it. For example, GMail shows the name of the current folder. No more cramped headers on the top of the page. The cost is screen real-estate on the left. This is not a problem for me since I use a wide screen and more web sites are designed for regular resolutions. Highly recommended.

I was so pleased with this transition, that I immediately thought about my IDE. I usually have at least 20 files open. Even on my wide 20" monitor, I see about 7 headers. In most cases, I work with two files, side by side, which means I see even less headers. Navigating the rest of the files is a pain. So, I looked for a solution.

I found an interesting plug-in called "EditorViewer". This plug-in provides a list of open editors. Since this is a separate view you can place it where you please. I placed it to the left of my editor.

It's close to what I was looking for, but not exactly. The plug-in seems to be deserted. Nobody touched it since it 2005. You can download it here (download link is missing from the site). There's no "Eclipse update site", but it does work on Eclipse 3.3.1 (and on a Mac). I think it should take less than a day to write something which fits my needs, so maybe I'll write myself, if I can find some spare time :-)