Steve Yegge on tabbed UI, 2008

Steve Yegge on tabbed UI, 2008

[Drew Adams]

"Tabs don't scale.  Tabbed browsing was revolutionary in the same way adding more tellers to a bank was revolutionary: it's, like, 4x better. w00t.

Emacs offers the unique ability to manage its open buffers in another first-class buffer, as a list. 

Imagine what your filesystem life would be like if the only view of a directory was one tab per file.  Go to your pictures directory and watch it start vomiting tabs out like it tried to swallow a box of chiclets. Fun!"

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/xemacs-is-dead-long-live-xemacs.html
___

(But yeah, it doesn't _hurt_ that Emacs can
_also_ use tabs.)

Re: Steve Yegge on tabbed UI, 2008

[Eric S Fraga]

On Saturday, 12 Mar 2022 at 16:26, Drew Adams wrote:
> (But yeah, it doesn't _hurt_ that Emacs can _also_ use tabs.)

Indeed and, for me, where Emacs is full screen on a large wide monitor,
tabs simply provide the equivalent of workspaces in (other) desktop
managers.  I seldom do anything outside Emacs but having a small number
(handful at most) of alternative views is useful.

-- 
Eric S Fraga with org 9.5.2 in Emacs 29.0.50 on Debian 11.2

Re: Steve Yegge on tabbed UI, 2008

[Robert Pluim]

>>>>> On Sun, 13 Mar 2022 12:07:21 +0000, Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> said:

    Eric> On Saturday, 12 Mar 2022 at 16:26, Drew Adams wrote:
    >> (But yeah, it doesn't _hurt_ that Emacs can _also_ use tabs.)

    Eric> Indeed and, for me, where Emacs is full screen on a large wide monitor,
    Eric> tabs simply provide the equivalent of workspaces in (other) desktop
    Eric> managers.  I seldom do anything outside Emacs but having a small number
    Eric> (handful at most) of alternative views is useful.

I donʼt use tabs with Emacs, because I find it much more convenient to
have multiple fullscreen frames overlaying each other. Itʼs a habit
derived from when my Emacs usage was purely in a terminal [1], and I find
it very effective when working on multiple unrelated projects.

Robert

Footnotes:
[1]  I *think* there were graphical terminals available at the time,
     but I certainly wasnʼt allowed to use one :-)

-- 

Re: Steve Yegge on tabbed UI, 2008

[Eric S Fraga]

On Monday, 14 Mar 2022 at 10:32, Robert Pluim wrote:
> I donʼt use tabs with Emacs, because I find it much more convenient to
> have multiple fullscreen frames overlaying each other. 

There's always more than one way to accomplish the same thing!  One of
the pleasures of using Emacs.

My preference for tabs over multiple frames is mostly due to the issue
of key bindings as I end up (sometimes) using different window managers
and window (X parlance) switching requires different keys.  Customising
Emacs is almost always much easier (for me) than doing so for the WM.

-- 
Eric S Fraga with org 9.5.2 in Emacs 29.0.50 on Debian 11.2

Re: Steve Yegge on tabbed UI, 2008

[Robert Pluim]

>>>>> On Mon, 14 Mar 2022 11:20:29 +0000, Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> said:

    Eric> My preference for tabs over multiple frames is mostly due to the issue
    Eric> of key bindings as I end up (sometimes) using different window managers
    Eric> and window (X parlance) switching requires different keys.  Customising
    Eric> Emacs is almost always much easier (for me) than doing so for the WM.

I bind and use `other-frame' to switch frames, so I donʼt care what
the window manager bindings are :-)

Robert
--