Dear Paul,
I absolutely agree with you regarding how important is the lightning-speed of EE, including when opening files, no buts! And I always opposed features that cause EE to bloat. Speed of opening files is why I use and like so much the Projects plugin. You click on a filename in the project tree and it is instantly open, even ones which are a few megabytes large. And source code files are tens of kilobytes at most. So I never hesitate to close a file if it clutters my desktop.
But the limitations of the projects plugin (see in my original post) are really annoying. And I agree with you that the way Workspaces are now they are not that useful, and they are already part of the core! So are Groups, which are part of the core for years now.
So what I am suggesting is to rename “Groups” as “projects”, associate them, one-to-one, with a workspace and just add the Project tree of hyperlinks.
I defer to Yutaka to answer how will that impact speed, if at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if it would even speed up the beast… :-)
Warm regards
Meir