Re: Tabbed buffers

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Richard Stallman writes:

 > But you are talking about something else:

Wrong "you".  Stefan is the guy who proposed the analogy of tty frames
to tabs.

I'm simply proposing that a tab control widget would be a useful
addition.  Specifically it allows one-click switching of the entire
content of a rectangular area, under control of a per-tabset Lisp
callback which takes the particular tab as an argument.  This could be
implemented as a GUI window (where available) or as a stripped-down
Emacs frame.  XEmacs instead allows a general callback which could
actually do anything, but by default uses switch-to-buffer.

My feeling is that tabs could be a useful alternative to the buffers
menu if attached to an Emacs window, but I have no experience with
that (XEmacs doesn't support that, at least, I don't know how to make
it happen).

What XEmacs does by default is attach tabs to each Emacs frame as an
always-visible alternative to the buffers menu, containing a
configurable selection of buffers.  The default filter collects all
the buffers in the same major mode as the buffer in the selected
window, but it's easy to use any other predicate, such as all buffers
visiting files in the same directory, all buffers with the same
name-sans-extension, etc.

If a frame contains multiple windows, the buffers tab refers to the
buffer in the selected window and other buffers in the same mode.
I find this implementation mildly awkward, rarely useful, and am
always amazed at how pleased newbies are to have this feature. ;-)
It's quite popular, actually.