Re: Tabbed buffers

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

Stefan Monnier writes:

 > Actually, I was not even thinking of adding a "tabs line" to the
 > tty display.  I was talking about the elisp-level.

That doesn't make any sense to me.  What you're talking about then is
a (Emacs) window configuration.  Tabs are a UI component.

It would make sense to have tabs available as a UI to switch window
configurations in a frame, but tabs could also be used to switch
buffers in a window, to page through a long list (as with library
catalog cards if you're old enough to remember them), etc.  All of
these could be implemented as a separate display container structure
(presumably frame > tab > window > buffer), but I really don't think
the extra complexity would buy you anything more than the current
frame > window > buffer scheme.  And (possibly) it would be more
restrictive than a tabs as UI scheme, where the tabs could be attached
to various display container widgets (although I suppose Emacs, like
XEmacs, doesn't really take advantage of widgets very much).