Re: Tabbed buffers

[Nick Roberts]

 > > I think the most natural thing is for tabs to exist just within a
 > > frame, and for each tab to have a window configuration.  Thus,
 > > switching to another tab would select its window configuraton.
 > > This is natural and already implemented.

It's not what I had in mind,  Eclipse has tabs for each window.  However,
it's probably a more realistic goal and would provide benefit.

 > That would be easy to implement, and I agree it would be insanely great
 > for many uses (especially if there are convenient key bindings for
 > moving to adjacent tabs) -- I'd _love_ to have a "Gnus" tab, and a "Gdb"
 > tab!
 > 
 > However that system would seem to essentially require making a tab to be
 > an explicit user action, somewhat heavyweight.

I don't agree, there seems to a direct correspondence with creating a new
frame:

C-x 7 C-f       find-file-other-tab
C-x 7 C-o       display-buffer-other-tab
C-x 7 .         find-tag-other-tab
C-x 7 0         delete-tab
C-x 7 1         delete-other-tabs
C-x 7 2         make-tab-command
C-x 7 b         switch-to-buffer-other-tab
C-x 7 d         dired-other-tab
C-x 7 f         find-file-other-tab
C-x 7 m         compose-mail-other-tab
C-x 7 o         other-tab
C-x 7 r         find-file-read-only-other-tab

in additions to actions that could be associated with mouse clicks.

 > In many other systems, on the other hand, tabs are more lightweight, and
 > essentially represent different buffers; making a new "buffer" (in some
 > other app) automatically creates a new tab, so the user can easily see
 > what buffers/files he's created, and move among them.
 > 
 > I suspect this latter style of usage is what most people mean when they
 > say they wish Emacs supported tabs, and they might be disappointed to
 > see some other meaning of the term.

I don't know what people would expect but I think a new tab should only
be created when explicitly requested.  Also for toolkits for which Emacs
doesn't support tabs the *-tab commands could revert to *frame commands

-- 
Nick                                           http://www.inet.net.nz/~nickrob