[Lazarus] Close all menu item ?

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Mon, 23 Mar 2020, Juha Manninen via lazarus wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 2:35 PM Marco van de Voort via lazarus <
> lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:
>
>> Personally I hate the mandatory open project (or else the modal
>> options). E.g. you want to open a .lpk and you have to create a project
>> first to open the menu item.
>>
>
> Not really because a project is always opened automatically when you start
> Lazarus.
> It's either the previously used project or a new empty project.
> The new empty project behaves almost like "no project" because you don't
> have to save it.
> IIRC the "Close Project" entry was added after a user request, but it is
> rather useless. You cannot do much anything when projects are closed.
> Everything is disabled then.
> I also remember the initial confusion because of this feature but now it
> feels very functional.
> A project never needs to be closed explicitly, it gets closed when another
> project is opened or when the whole IDE is closed.

Well, I think it does need to be closed from time to time.

Namely: I want to be sure that all is closed before doing an svn
update or git pull. Although many bugs have been fixed, still from time to
time when you do an update of files on disk, Lazarus messes up and
overwrites incoming changes.

These things are unfortunately very hard to reproduce. I have reported
several problems to Mattias, who promptly fixed them, but still it occurs
under hard-to-reproduce circumstances.

So, for safety, now I close the IDE, do the svn/git update, and then open the IDE.

In Delphi (which has the same problem with SVN/git/...), 
I don't close the IDE, I just close all files.

Luckily, the startup time of Lazarus is much shorter than Delphi's
(the latter easily takes up to a minute to start).

I could also temporarily open another project, but that is just as much a
kludge as closing the IDE, worse yet, I can inadvertently change that
project - and I know this from experience :(

So, yes, I would actually prefer that 'Close all' does what it says on the
tin, and really closes *all*.

That I cannot do anything after this till I have opened the project again, 
is quite OK with me. It would even be OK if it just automatically started an
empty new project after I did 'close all', as during startup. Just as long
as all previously opened files are closed.

Michael.