Re: Gtk tabs in emacs, new branch.

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

Jan Djärv writes:

 > I'm not a big fan for making things general just for the sake of
 > making things general so we maybe in the future can add something
 > we don't know what it is now.
 > 
 > Are there any concrete examples of other uses?

Because the tab metaphor involves switching a well-defined area of
screen from one use to another (I don't subscribe to the "just a
contiguous row of buttons" interpretation), one can trivially subsume
all uses into "window configuration management".  But the
implementation of changing what's seen onscreen might involve far more
than swapping one GUI widget in in place of another, and it might not
involve swapping GUI widgets at all (where for this purpose I consider
Emacs windows as widgets).

In use now?  Probably not, because of the very limited imaginations of
tab developers (or if you prefer, because of the very limited
imaginations that tab developers attribute to their users).

But easy to implement given a flexible tab framework?  Lots of them.
How about varying font-lock to highlight different aspects of a buffer
using "layers" of font-lock specs controlled by tabs?  Many others
that you might classify as "window configuration management", but
other users might not.  I have in mind switching "projects", which
might involve piles of behind the scenes machinery such as restoring
undisplayed buffers in the background, querying status of VCS, etc.