that's the way it's intended to work. it's so you can temporarily remove a file from a sketch without deleting it entirely, since p5 has no "project" file and just loads everything in the folder.

i'll implement the dropdown thing sometime soon (though if you have that many tabs, wouldn't you rather use eclipse?) but for now it's the "When you have too many tabs, things get ugly" item in the faq: http://processing.org/faq/bugs.html#known

yeah, we initially planned that, but decided we were just trying to do too much.. we're trying to keep p5 from being a full-blown ide (or having to add a "basic" and "advanced" mode) since if we try to become all things to all people it's just gonna turn into bloatware.

sure, we'd love an official tutorial. would you like to write one?

as with so many of the things on the suggestions board, it's not for our lack of wanting better documentation, more features, etc.. it's just that there's a limit to what casey and i can do since processing is developed in our free time. of course we "should" have a tutorial about it. we also "should" have a book about processing done by now and been at 1.0 two years ago, but hey, who's counting?

since the project is open, you've got all the code, and you've got free tech support from me who's writing (almost) all the code, there's plenty of room for you and others to contribute this sort of thing. toxi has his eclipse tutorial which casey recently updated for beta, and there's the howto in the libraries folder, somewhere in between that oughta be able to get you started on writing a good tutorial for us.

we also plan to add a "dev" section of the site that will start covering more of these things, which casey and i will be hashing out when i see him this weekend.