Re: Opening multiple files in a single buffer?

[Gregory Heytings <ghe@sdf.org>]

>
>> Indeed, but that's not the point.  As I said what I'm proposing is a 
>> way to do some things more easily (for some users).  Everything that 
>> could be done with such a feature can already be done in other ways. 
>> I don't use the menu-bar, the tool-bar, customize, or the menus on the 
>> mode-line. But I do not consider that they are useless.  All these 
>> features make it possible to do things more easily (for some users), 
>> that can already be done in other ways.
>
> Before you decide to dive into this, I would suggest doing a test run by 
> writing a simple script to cat the files together with a separator and 
> edit that file with something like search and replace or bounce around 
> in various places making edits.  I have vague memories that when buffers 
> get extremely big, emacs slows down considerably but my memories are not 
> clear enough to recall the exact circumstances.
>
> Perhaps one of the emacs maintainers can jump in and comment.  Is emacs 
> going to be more efficient with several “small” buffers rather than one 
> extremely large buffer.  Some of the people commenting are wanting to 
> load up an entire project into a single buffer.  As I recall, that is 
> going to be very unfriendly to use.
>

That's not correct.  On my laptop, I can easily edit a 100 (one hundred) 
MB text file, Emacs is almost as reactive as with a 1 KB text file.  Of 
course some operations take more time, e.g. a query-replace-regexp on the 
whole buffer, but from what I see (on my laptop it takes about four 
seconds, with a regexp) I doubt that it takes more time than hundred 
query-replace-regexp in a 1 MB file, or for that matter than doing this 
with dired on hundred 1 MB files.

Gregory