I’m thinking that it’s a design choice that the primary/secondary names of the views is not displayed. You can move files from one view to the “other” view. You can rotate the views. If you rotate twice then you have swapped them. When you close the last file in view then it vanishes and the remaining view runs in full screen mode.
The default is the primary view on the left and secondary view on the right. When both views have files and thus are visible you can:
Switch the focus between the views using F8.
Snap a view to “full” screen using the little arrows at the top and bottom of the view divider. This is a bit confusing as you can’t snap back to the divided 2-view mode but instead need to drag the divider. The confusion increases after snapping when you see the little arrows pointing towards the outside edge of Notepad++ but they don’t do anything when clicked. The F8 switch between views does “nothing.” The first time you use the F8 toggle it shoves the divider over a few pixels but not enough to make the other view usable.
Right click the divider bar and rotate the views. You can rotate right (which means clockwise) or left (which means counter-clockwise). If you rotate in the same direction twice you have reversed the positions of the views. A confusing aspect is when you have a view snapped to be visible and then do rotate twice then it snaps to the other view.
One more detail that can be confusing is the handling of empty new # tabs. If an empty new # tab is the only thing in a view and then you move either a normal file or another new # (empty not) then the empty new # tab vanishes, if, and only if, it also does not have an undo buffer. Normally you can Ctrl+W close an empty new # and it’s silently destroyed, even if it has an undo buffer and is thus dirty. Notepad++ has an exception where it won’t auto-destroy a dirty new # tab if it’s the only thing in a destination view.
When you close or move-out all of the tabs in the primary view then the secondary view snaps to full screen without a divider bar. The OP that started this thread was confused when then then did a “move to other view” which made the primary view visible. The OP does not mention rotating and so I assume that means the primary view was restored to the left side of the divider. The OP either had forgotten the view that had been looking at was the secondary view or had made the assumption that if only one view is visible that it must be the primary. The OP was confused that the “other” view popped up on the left when they had expected it to be on the right.
Thus, while the view system has its quirks I don’t see a compelling case to make any changes to it. It may help to know why @Tim-Jarrett, the OP, or others are using the view system.
