Separate area at the top for a serious tab bar

["R. Diez" <rdiezmail-emacs@yahoo.de>]

Hi all:


A tab bar is a very important usability element. Virtually every other editor has it. For many people, including myself, visual, positional clues makes life much easier.

I just do not want to live without one.  Therefore, I am a long-time user of tabbar.el . I have installed several little enhancements and hacked together some dodgy Lisp code over the years. It is a problematic solution that still frustrates me on a regular basis.

I am no Lisp expert, but I am sure that many smarter people would quickly write a better tab bar package if given a good chance. My bet is that something is holding them back.

The reason may be the lack of a separate area for a tab bar. If I remember correctly, the current tabbar.el steals an area designed for displaying a ruler. This stealing causes problems, because the handling of that area is not flexible enough and yields trouble here and there. It is not a good basis to build upon.

I have just read the following in the Emacs 26.1 change log:

"Emacs now supports optional display of line numbers in the buffer. This is similar to what 'linum-mode' provides, but much faster and doesn't usurp the display margin for the line numbers."

I guess that there was a similar problem there: the old code had to usurp the margin for another purpose.

This is my plea to the Emacs gurus: Implement a suitable area at the top of windows/frames/whatever to pave the way for a serious tab bar implementation.

Best regards,
  rdiez