Re: Tab bar

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> It would be good to have a tab bar of perspectives, too.

> Especially if you are talking about having multiple tab bars of
> different types, using something narrow, such as a header line, is
> better than using huge tabs, such as were shown.

All the current Elisp-based tabbars I've seen might be good
proofs-of-concept but are not appropriate implementations: they either
hijack the toolbar, or the header-line, neither of which is acceptable.
Also they both have the corresponding limitation: tabbar.el cannot be
used for perspectives because header lines are "per-window", and
tab-bar.el cannot be used for buffers because toolbars are "per-frame".

I think a good implementation for a tabbar would be to use a whole
window (and buffer) for the tabbar (set mode-line-format to nil and
window-min-height to 1 or 2).  This would allow placing it anywhere in
the window tree, and hence all both "one per frame" and "one per
window".  Of course, to make it work well, we probably need some changes
at the C level in order to treat those windows specially, although we
can probably kludge around it in an Elisp-only proof-of-concept.


        Stefan