Re: Tabbed buffers

[Bastien Guerry <bzg@altern.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     I can still switch from one tab to another: in this case, a tab is
>     really just a window configuration, but switching from one window
>     configuration to another one without having to store them is quite
>     handy.  
>
> It sounds like, in your usage, this is just a way
> to save and name window configurations.  Is that right?

Right but not complete.  

I use elscreen mainly to *cycle* through tabs (i.e. to cycle through
window configurations) and to open a new tab when needed.

It seems to me that, in this discussion, we should really talk about
"workspaces" - not "tabs".  Or at least we could disambiguate these and
use "tab" for the visual UI feature and "workspace" for the underlying
window configuration (and the properties we would like to attach to it.)

I use elscreen to easily *cycle* through workspaces and to easily
*create* new ones.

Having "workspaces" (or whatever you want to call them) would be very
useful for letting variables be local to them.  For example I use this:

  (make-variable-buffer-local 'search-ring)

but this would make more sense in a workspace rather than in a buffer.

Or see the function `erc-iswitchb': it restricts the list of buffers to
the one that are used by ERC.  I've implemented something like this for
Org as well.  If you use ERC in a dedicated workspace, then the notion
of "ERC buffers" is really an instance of the more general notion of
"This workspace buffers."

-- 
Bastien