I am not sure I agree with that: I think gedit central object should be the document not the tab or the window.

This discussion may become moot with gnome-shell, since as far as I understand there will be a way to tell the shell ho to create a menu for those kind of operations

I've described a number of practical advantages to having New Window and New Tab. I'll reiterate them:

 * This will be consistent with other tabbed apps. Consistency is good because it enables users to feel at home, to know what to expect, and gives them less mental processing to do.
 * New Window and New Tab are more accurate, since they describe the operations to which they refer with more specificity than 'New' does.
 * It gives users more flexability and control, since it allows them to specify where a new document will be opened.

What are the practical advantages of the current approach?

GNOME Shell will be providing an application menu, though the design of that application menu is still in it's early stages. gedit will still have to provide menus for when GNOME Shell isn't being used though, afaik.

I found it very confusing when I tried to open a new gedit window and the menu wouldn't allow me to do so. Take gnome-terminal, which allows me to open a new tab (like a document in the same window in gedit) and a new window aswell. Consistently to that, I expected gedit to have a similar menu entry but it didn't.

It took me a few minutes to remember that gnome-shell has a context menu on the launcher entries that would maybe allow me to do that, but only because I *heard* of this before and otherwise I might have never tried and might be left without any ability to open a new window. (gedit --new-window is not really obvious or anything.)

Multiple windows are REALLY required to manage many projects at once, you cannot just stuff two 50 file projects into the same documents list without any distinction.

Therefore, please add a New window entry to the menu. I'd suggest shift+ctrl+n as keyboard shortcut.

I don't agree either. Gedit wants to open/create documents, the tab term doesn't have any sense for me here IMHO

Also see that there is already a menuitem to open a document in a new window. Documents->move to new window. Or drag the tab out of the window. Or use the commandline.

Nobody suggested anything with a tab entry, the suggestion was a File>"New window" entry. Also all you suggest is totally unobvious - it works, but no user figures this out on their own, also I did not. Now that you tell me, nice that there is a work around - but it is just somewhat hidden.

Nautilus, terminal and many others have just File>New window - hence, when I go there for gedit and it doesn't work, the first natural reaction is to go to gnome shell and just try to start the application once more but that will just get up the already running gedit instance - and now most people, including me (and I'm by no means a beginner to using computers), get stuck!

So why not just stick to the convention here?

Alternatively, offer "Open in new window...", that would also be hard to miss.

Actually, that would for completeness also require a "New in new window" for just starting out with a fresh window, which just sounds stupid (and it would be two entries instead of one). You really should just add a "New window" entry and stick to the convention and not make it so hard for the user to figure out.

Actually I think this should go now in the app menu once we manage to finish the port. Thoughts?

As of git master, I see a tab icon that opens a new tab and App Menu > New Window.