I don't think either approach is an anti-pattern - different use cases will be useful for different users. I've found combining application instances to be quite useful since I use a lot of applications with no internal instance switching (PuTTY is the biggest offender here) but to each their own. This setting being a setting just felt like a good idea.

>> I don't think either approach is an anti-pattern - different use cases will be useful for different users.

That's why I prefaced it with 'for me'.

Other people can use works best for them. I know what works best for me.

In my personal lexicon "anti-pattern" is a pretty universal term - X isn't an anti-pattern for Alice but not Bob - it's either an anti-pattern for everyone or it isn't an anti-pattern.

So I think in my comment above I mostly just automatically omitted the "for me" when reading your original remark.

>> In my personal lexicon "anti-pattern" is a pretty universal term - X isn't an anti-pattern for Alice but not Bob - it's either an anti-pattern for everyone or it isn't an anti-pattern.

I agree.

svnpenn's comment characterized "Never combine" as an anti-pattern, but it is my preferred configuration.

Perhaps it would have been more accurate to just say that "Never combine" is not an anti-pattern since many users prefer it for various reasons.