Do others think that Lettera should support multiple editor panes in a single window? I imagine that this is a feature the developers might be hesitant to add, so I was curious to see what other people think about it.
Personally, I’d really love it if Lettera supported multiple editor panes which can be arranged via drag-and-drop, as in Obsidian, VSCode, etc; I find it really valuable to be able to read two notes side by side. I haven’t found many natives Mac apps with this feature, but one really nice implementation is in the Nova IDE by Panic.
(PS I’m new to this forum, so sorry if it’s bad form to try to start a discussion like this, or if I’ve duplicated a prior post. And thanks to all the developers for a great app!)
So this would be splitting the editor window. Scrivener does this; you can have four panes if you want. But here, it looks more complicated, since you can open files that aren’t in the sidebar folder, that don’t even display the sidebar. To split the editor, you need to be able to select the other file. If you access it by Command-O, that’s one thing, but if it’s in the sidebar folder, then you have no easy way to access it.
Yes, I mean splitting the editor window; I wasn’t sure what to call it-- having multiple editor panes/panels, ability to split the editor window, etc. I agree there would be a lot of non-trivial design decsions-- in the case you describe, opening a file that isn’t in the sidebar, you could have an option to “open file in new tab” vs “open file in new pane”, as well as just dragging a file from the finder to a new pane, as is possible in VSCode (or there could be a design decision that in a single window, only documents from the same workspace can be tiled; this would be consistent with the workspace vs single file separation that the app already enforces).
There would be other issues to tackle as well – for example, if you want the individual panes to be able to contain multiple editor tabs, then you need a tab system independent of the native mac tabs. The way apps like PyCharm and VSCode deal with this is that the native system tabs are used at the workspace level, and then the apps have there own tabs-and-split-panes systems for viewing documents internal to a workspace.
So it would not be trivial to get it right, but I don’t think Lettera has any needs that these other apps don’t have, so in principle it could be done well. For me personally at least, this would make it into the dream notes app – all the features I find useful in Obsidian, without the ugly UI, bad editor style defaults (in my opinion), and electron bloat.
Let me add this… IF Lettera were to support multiple editor panes in a single window, I recommend it follow the way the Zed app does this.
You can drag a file into the window, and it shades the left, right, top, and bottom regions to let you see where you can place it, then drop it quickly and easily.
Honestly, I don’t really care, whether that will be implemented or not. In Lettera it is easy to open a new window from the same workspace resp. to open a different workspace and then arrange the two windows side by side. That covers every possibility you could think of, doesn’t it? Two editors in the same window can’t compete with that, unless I’ve overlooked something.
I rarely use editor splits in Scrivener, but when I do use them, they’re a lot more practical than using multiple windows.
I know BBEdit lets you split the editor, and I can see how it can be useful if you’re working with code, and comparing two versions, or updating one file and not another. it can be a lot easier than multiple windows.
But like many such features, there are two kinds of people; those who use them and those who don’t.