On 05 Jan 2014, at 14:25, Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 11:13 PM, chad <yandros@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Windows as tabs by default would almost certainly improve familiarity by default. 
> The keybindings are confusing to many people. People who accidentally split-window are very confused.
> 
> Tabs is a very good feature, but it can't replace "split windows". The latter must be taught to beginners. 

As stated, I disagree (and this is coming from a person who lived inside emacs-as-window-system for most of a year). It might come from seeing dozens (maybe hundreds) of smart people decide that “Quit Emacs” was the best way to accomplish what I would do with "C-x 1”, and that was before tabs.

I think that *help* and *completions* can teach beginners about split windows just fine, and from there they can learn about split-window-{below,right}, winner/windmove, pop-up-windows, frames, and tabs as fits their preferences.

All that’s IMHO, of course.

~Chad