Hi,
It would be nice if I could have two html pages open at once in BSS.
Currently you have to double click in the “design” panel to change to index.html and back to something else. If I could have two pages open simultaneously I can copy things over / use as a reference by simply changing tabs.
A keyboard shortcut for this would be nice too maybe control tab like google chrome.
And PLEASE give us a warning before exporting and overriding the folder selected in export settings! The amount of times i’ve almost deleted some work by mistake is scary
+1 on having multiple pages open, that would be awesome to me too. I wouldn’t stop at 2 though, we should be able to open any amount of pages we want to, same as we would in any text editor. Would save a lot of time when copying and pasting things from/to multiple pages.
Wouldn’t mind the alert either, but not necessary for me. I have a pretty good routine for that where any time I’m going to export, the first thing I do is open the export folder, make a new folder with the date in it inside that main folder, drag everything from the last export into that folder.
Now I’m ready to export and never lose my previous exported items.
I also increment a number suffix I add to my BSS project name, each day that I work on it. This way I don’t lose what was there either and can always go back, or get something from it to bring into the new one if I’ve removed it a while ago, etc.
I’ve not managed to delete anything important YET but it’s always scary when I miss that little arrow on the export button before changing the output folder.
There’s just a few pixels difference between erasing my previous export and changing the output folder.
If i’m working on several projects and manage to misclick, it’ll erase the entire folder of another project.
A simple “Are you sure” message would suffice.
Your routine sounds foolproof but I feel like it’s a long process just to do something that microsoft word would do for you. (Save as and create new folder)
I think you’re not understanding how the export function works between projects. Each project has it’s own export folder if you set it up correctly. You should not need to be changing it at all between projects unless you’re making a new one and setting it up. BSS will retain the location of your export until you change it. Each project is a separate entitiy for that so you cannot overwrite one project with another project’s files unless you are trying to do them all to the same folder which … no no no! LOL
I see, forgive my ignorance haha. Still though, a warning dialogue would be great
I agree for sure a warning can never hurt. Hopefully that information helps you alleviate some file overwriting anxiety too 
I think multiple pages would be a fantastic addition. I seem to remember suggesting something like this once before to the devs, and they said there was something fundamental way to the way in which the program handled copying and pasting that would makes this extremely difficult to implement without a major rewrite of the software. (At least I think that’s how it was explained.) That’s one area that Pinegrow shines above BSS. PG can have every page of a website open at once. The only problem is, Pinegrow’s copy/paste system is incredibly flakey even when you’re working with just one page. When you start working with multiple pages, I find it often becomes so confused that it’s nearly useless.
As for warnings, I don’t mind warning dialogues as long as they can be turned off/dismissed for power users. I export dozens and dozens of times a day from multiple websites. I absolutely don’t need to see a warning every time I do it. It would have to have a check box on the warning message that says, “do not show this warning dialogue in the future”, which is how Adobe does it.
This was one of the things that frustrated Pinegrow users for YEARS. They had these dumb warning notifications that would appear directly in the workspace, blocking the website, and they’d linger for about 6-7 seconds and then fade away. If you did ten errors in a row, the warning boxes would stack up and block the entire workspace. They could not be dismissed. It was infuriating! We complained about them constantly for months and months, and then finally in one of the updates, they provided a global option in the preference to disable warnings. But when they’re enabled, the STILL block the workspace. For some reason, the PG team just cannot seem to get the UI of that program to be “friendly.”
Regarding pop-up warnings, long before Adobe made their warning dismissable, I actually found a small, absolutely fabulous and FREE utility program for my PC called “Click Off” which can scan and dismiss any Windows-based window that appears in any program on the computer. This little program has been a godsend to my work. I have so many intrusive and time-consuming messages from various programs - everything from Microsoft Outlook to Adobe Photoshop - that would normally interrupt my workflow, but which automatically disappear now thanks to this little gem of a program. Sorry, @jo-r it’s for Windows only…
As for failsafe backups, I have triple redundancy. I have the backup system in the program set to backup my website every 15 minutes, so the most I can ever lose is 15 mins worth of work. I have my entire Bootstrap studio backup folder backed up to a second internal hard drive every day, so in the event of a primary hard drive failure, I never lose more than a day of work. Lastly, all my website files are synchronised to my dropbox cloud storage every week, so even if my entire computer was destroyed, I’d never lose my websites.
Lastly, once a month I turn on a second computer that is normally kept turned off, which is not connected to the internet, and I do a synchronized backup of all my work to this offline computer, so that even if my main computer was destroyed, and my dropbox got hit with ransomware, I would still only be a month down in terms of restoring all my work.
Barring a total societal collapse, or the combined destruction of both my computers AND a dropbox ransomware virus, there is virtually no way I could ever lose all my client files.
Oh, and just for added insurance, every Sunday, my entire C: drive is compressed and mirrored to another third internal hard drive, which includes everything on my desktop, which is where sites that are actively being built are kept.
After 35 years, and having owned well over a dozen computers, I’ve encountered every catastrophic failure scenario you can imagine. My current system is about as redundant and bulletproof as you can get.
Is it still not possible to have multiple pages of the same project open simultaniously?
Hi @robert_m_muench,
Yeah, still not a feature part of Bootstrap Studio. As @printninja mentions, I think adding this feature would require the developers to do a major redevelopment of how the application behaves, I wouldn’t want to say it will never happen! But it seems unlikely.
I personally have never had much need to open two pages at once but on the odd occasion I have I have just duplicated my project file, then opened it in a new tab in Bootstrap Studio to use as reference instead of having to use the dropdown to switch between pages.
The use-case is pretty straightforward and I could use such a feature always: check if the layout fits an other page, compare side-by-side, different language versions, etc.
I have to agree with @robert_m_muench on this. Although it has been asked for many times over the years and still haven’t seen it. I think @catkin is probably right in that it would take a lot of revamping to do it. I would love it myself too, but I’ve learned how to get around pretty well without it so it’s not a detrimental thing for me, just would be nice if it were possible.
Pinegrow has multi-page capability, and I still prefer to build my sites in BSS.
If I want to compare a another page in my site to the one I have open, I just do a browser preview of the website, and then switch to the other page in the preview (of course, you need more than one monitor for this, which I highly recommend.) If you have your computer on a WiFi network, you can open your preview website on a WiFi connected phone or tablet by typing in the BSS-generated URL. I find this is very helpful when building sites.
The big challenge with having multiple pages open at the same time is - how do you have the program handle undo/redo. Pinegrow still seems to struggle with this.
Sorry, but handling multiple open pages is not rocket-science, every text editor can do that.
There is a lot of wasted space here:
And if it’s really hard to do, then let me at least open different pages at the same time.
If you see BSS as a text editor and a bs.design file is a text document. You can open multiple bs.designs (text documents) and they will be in the tabs in the tool bar. You can click a tab and edit and copy & paste between the tabs with bs.designs(text documents) just like any other text editor.
What’s the point to have the pages in tabs in the tool bar, you can only see one at the time anyway
Switching between pages is just a click on a page in the options panel under pages
If the program did support multiple pages open at once, would the undo/redo feature be page specific, or site specific? If it’s site specific, then the act of switching between pages becomes part of the history. I feel like this could get very confusing very quickly.
