What does pinning a tab do in PhpStorm?

Question

I've noticed you can pin a tab on any file in PhpStorm, what does it do? It seems I can just close the tab anyway.

Answer 1

tl;dr: it's use to stop the file from auto closing.

1. PhpStorm can limit the number of tabs you have opened at once.
2. When it reaches it's limit it will close tab accordingly (by default this is 10 in your settings)
3. To stop selected tabs from been closed, you can pin the tabs.
4. Probably the most useful feature - When you go to right click on a tab, close all, it will not close the pinned tabs.

Summary from the PhpStorm docs on this.