The project/workspace (whatever it’s called) on the left is very nifty. You set it to a directory and when you come back, there it is in the same place. Great.
The problem occurs if I forget to mount the drive it’s pointing to. When I go into Komodo, it tells me that the folder does not exist. Fine. But then it changes the folder to some default location (such as the user home folder). This is not good. This is fine for a file selection dialog, but not for my project.
Worse still, if I mount the drive and come back into Komodo, then it completely forgot what I had originally—now it has saved my user home directory as my project directory. In other words, it changed and saved my setting without telling me.
Much, much better would be the approach used in for example Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. If the folder isn’t available, the root folder should be disabled and grayed out.
This is a low-priority bug. It won’t happen if I always remember to mount my project drive. But for the once or twice a month I am inevitably going to forget, it’s going to be very irritating.
P.S. What is that sidebar called again? Workspace or project? And strangely I can’t find where I turn it on or off, even though I must have before. Is it in the View menu somewhere?
Please get into the habit of using projects, what you could simply do in this case is double click the project from your projects widget (bottom left) to reopen it after you mounted your drive.
I agree this UX is not ideal, but this is fairly edge case and it would be difficult to justify prioritizing something so niche over more important UX improvements and bug fixes.
But I don’t want extra files. (Besides, doesn’t a project file sound like something more for Komodo IDE than Komodo Edit? ) I just want to show my directory in the sidebar. The last thing I need is more files for Git to track, especially as these files will have per-user information. Oh, yes, I can use .gitignore. More workarounds. etc.
(sigh) Looks like I’ll be digging into the source code some more. But thanks for the quick answer.
Where is the option to show and hide the sidebar? I can’t find it and I don’t remember what it is called. (I want to be able to show and hide it without going into focus mode.) Thanks.
Which toolbar button is that? Is it one I have to add, or does it appear by default?
Is there no menu option for toggling places?
I tried View > Tabs & Sidebars > Places, but that only brings it back after I remove it. It doesn’t seem to toggle. Moreover when it is present, there is no checkbox by View > Tabs & Sidebars > Places in the menu—this must be a bug.
The toolbar is enabled by default. I’m not sure if you’ve disabled it or not. If you’ve hidden it you can show it through View > Toolbars > Show Toolbars
Here’s a link to more information about the toolbar (workspace toolbar): http://docs.komodoide.com/Manual/workspace#the-komodo-workspace_toolbars
The View menu isn’t a toggle. It’s just to show. As @nathanr mentioned, you can use the toolbar or a keybinding to show hide. You can also click the x in the top right corner of the Places pane to hide it.
I just discovered that Atom Editor does exactly what I want (and what a user would expect, I believe): if the “Places” location is not available, then it simply disables it but keeps the root folder in the pane for the location in case you mount the location the next time Atom is ran. In fact if you mount the location while Atom is running, you can access the location without restarting Atom.
Atom just does the right thing here. Komodo changes my settings without asking me, assuming that it knows best when it runs into something it doesn’t understand.
And today also I realized that Atom Editor allows you to easily toggle its version of “Places” with a simple Ctrl+. In other words, it has a toggle, and it has a key binding.
Ouch, four wins for Atom in one day:
Atom doesn’t lose my Places directory.
Atom allows toggling Places.
Atom has a default key mapping for toggling Places.
Atom allows “sticky” font size without creating a new scheme.
Frankly I had written off Atom because Komodo is so slick; but now that I realize I’m going to have to learn to write plugin for either, and after recently learning about the upcoming fate of XUL (after I’ve purchased every book published on XUL so that I could write plugins for Komodo), I’ll have to admit that I’m going back and taking a second look at atom. I’m not trying to troll or argue—I’m just trying to give some user feedback. As I also harp about, user experience out of the box is a huge plus—even if the target user audience is developers.
Hey @garretwilson, we were strictly referring to the View menu. There are multiple methods of toggling Places. One being the toolbar as mentioned above then there is the command cmd_viewPlaces which is mapped to Ctrl + Shift + P by default.
All the default panes and sidebars should have a show/hide command associated with them by default.
) I just want to show my directory in the sidebar. The last thing I need is more files for Git to track, especially as these files will have per-user information. Oh, yes, I can use 
A little sarcasm, but I was just kidding.