Re: Two GTK related feature requests

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     * "Tabbed editing".  People using modern web browsers will know what I
>       mean.  It is very addictive.  Essentially it would add buttons at
>       the top of the Emacs window, one button for each buffer.  Clicking
>       on one button will change focus to that buffer.  Each tab may also
>       have a X button that kill that buffer.  There are several details to
>       be sorted out, e.g., should the tab be per-window or per-frame?
>
> It is clear how this would work when you have just a few buffers, but
> what about when you have 50?  We need to finish designing this feature
> before implementing it.

Right.

I have been using tabbar.el for a while now, and it appear to have
discovered this problem as well.  The solution it uses is to group
different kind of buffers together and only show tabs for those
buffers.  So if you are in a C mode buffer, you only see tabs for C
mode buffers.  Etc.  You can press a special button to go to the
top-level scope and list meta-groups, e.g. 'Mail', 'C', 'Common',
'Help'.

It might be usable approach, but tabbar.el break C-x b RET in some
cases, e.g. switching between a mail buffer and a C mode buffer.  C-x
b RET will only switch between the last used buffer within the current
scope, i.e. mail-to-mail or c-to-c.  C-x b RET will never cross the
scope (unless, I guess, the scope only contain one buffer).  Because
of this, I'll likely stop using it soon.