Hacker News Reader

# The Multitasker – Have more than 50 source files open at the same time

Why should the user distinguish between "in memory" and "on disk". That's a performance optimization for the program to decide on.

(Incidentally, I would really enjoy a "national force-ide-programmers-to-use-vim day". "Wow, you can switch between files without your whole system crashing!?")

View on HN

I think it was more about how many tabs are open at once, which I would suppose means in memory since they're all going to be editable.

In Eclipse, the contents of a tab are represented by an IEditorInput instance which only loads the file (or whatever the editor edits) on demand; if your Eclipse starts with a stored session of 50 tabs, it doesn't need to open 50 files.

The Mozilla team could learn from this.

Meh. I set my IDE to only keep 10 files open at a time. It's such an easy thing to jump into a file nowadays I don't need them all piling up in the background.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com