Bug 465007

Please revert kwrite to be a single document program again, or add a feature to configure this.

The switch to MDI in kwrite has turned out to be most problematic for these two moves in my regular workflows:

1) The default keyboard shortcut Ctrl+N changed behavior and no longer means "new window", but instead opens a new tab. This is very confusing. It can probably be worked around by changing the shortcuts, but it was nevertheless not a pleasant surprise. Ctrl+N has always been more of a "new window" shortcut for me, probably also because of familiarity with web browsers where Ctrl+T is usually for opening a new tab and Ctrl+N is for opening a new window. I also know that Konsole/Yakuake have Ctrl+Shift+T as the shortcut (the extra Shift modifier is probably needed so that regular Ctrl+Letter shortcuts can be passed to the terminal). Can these defaults please be changed with Ctrl+N reverted to its old semantics?

2) When I have a single document open, and I try to close kwrite, the "Save documents" dialog no longer works as before. Having been a kwrite user for a long time, I've always used the keyboard sequence of Alt+F4 to close kwrite, Tab to focus the "Discard" button and Space/Enter/Return to activate the choice, so this has been in my muscle memory. This no longer works in the new dialog. The new dialog is also needlessly complex if I only use kwrite for single documents and it took me a long time to actually understand all its features. So the first 30 times or so when I needed to quickly close kwrite, I greatly struggled to figure out the dialog, the action required and to actually perform the needed interaction. I eventually resolved to using the mouse (instead of my keyboard) to click the right button. This takes a lot of precious seconds. While writing this bug report I discovered, I can use Shift+Tab instead of just Tab (which I'm used to), so this will also take a lot of additional time getting used to. Would it please be possible to reinstate the old "Save document" dialog in case only one document is open?

I apologize in case this sounds like a rant. I'm actually very grateful and much all your work, but I just really miss the old behavior. I believe the above two issues can probably be solved in the context of MDI as well, so I'm considering filing the above these in separate issue reports. But before I do I must really ask this one question: can I have my old n̶o̶t̶e̶p̶a̶d̶ kwrite back again? :-)

KDE already has Kate for MDI, so from a UI perspective: what was the rationale behind making kwrite MDI as well?