Xcode 4: Open New Tab When Double-Clicking a File
November-28-2011 Filed in: Xcode
Xcode 4 adds support for tabbed editing. When using tabbed editing you most likely want Xcode to open a new tab when you open a file from the project navigator. To get this behavior you must tell Xcode to open a new tab when you double-click a file in the project navigator.
Open Xcode’s preferences. Click the General button. Choose Uses Separate Tab from the Double Click Navigation menu.
Now when you double-click a file in the project navigator, Xcode opens the file in a new tab.
One Response to “Xcode 4: Open New Tab When Double-Clicking a File”
Leave a Reply
Powered by WordPress
I’ve been caught by this a number of times. It looks like the setting does not persist between runs of Xcode. I kept the Preferences file com.apple.dt.Xcode.plist open (in TextWrangler) and noticed that a field IDEEditorCoordinatorTarget_DoubleClick was written to the file when I changed the setting (to Same As Single Click, which I prefer). I quit Xcode and the setting was still there. I restarted Xcode and the setting got removed. There’s something in the XCode startup sequence that removes this setting. This doesn’t happen, however, if you choose Separate Tab as your preference. It looks a like a bug in the preference validation code is thinking Same As Single Click is an invalid option.