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Comment by colinramsay | Hacker News Reader

This was my first thought, and you're right. But what if the author means two columns as in a newspaper or magazine, where the same content continues off the bottom of the left pane to the top of the right one? Does anything support that? Would it be useful?

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Emacs provides this with Follow Mode:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Fol...

Interestingly I find the default behavior more helpful. Usually if there are any declarations or some init code at the top and some use of those later, I would want to view the top of the file in one column and work or edit in another part without having both scroll synchronously.

Sometimes I have the same file open in 3 or 4 columns if I need to see what is happening in multiple parts of the code in front of me.

This is already present in many (if not all?) editors already. In vim or emacs you can open a new buffer/window/pane (whatever terminology is used) on the same file and put different views of the same file (with live changes) side by side. I often do this when I need to keep an eye on the header/import section of a file and also work at the bottom of the file at the same time.

I'm pretty sure a lot of other editors/IDEs I've used in the past also support this. It's nothing new.

> This is already present in many (if not all?) editors already.

No. Tiling is, but it doesn't behave as if you had a single file view wrapping across columns. Emacs does have that via follow-mode, but I don't think I've seen it anywhere else (though vim might have something equivalent to follow-mode)

I think that is what he/she means, and I agree. I think that'd be awesome to have. That way you are more efficient with your space available.

It wouldn't. When you scroll a side, the others moves too, which is probably not what you want.

Most editors with split views let you open the same file splitted and you can see two parts of the same file at the same time. That's useful.

Another option would be to have more options to display addition development related information in side columns. Code statistics, terminal window, program source code visualization, live browser output for Web coding and such...

In Emacs you can have as many independent view to same buffer as you like.

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