Re: how to keep a permanent buffer list open?

[Brendan Miller]

Thanks for your replies; however, I think I may not have been clear in
communicating what I want to do.

I've attached a screenshot that shows the behavior I want in gedit. In
particular, on the left hand side of the gedit screenshot you can see
a list of all open buffers in gedits "documents" list.

This is the UI behavior I want becaue it lets me visually keep track
of all buffers. It also is fairly space efficient, or at least good
enough for my needs.

The main problem with tabs for me is that I tend to have a lot of
documents open, and they don't scale. So in other editors I usually
turn tabs off and open a buffer list of some kind like in gedit. In
firefox I use the tree style tabs plugin:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

So maybe given the gedit screenshot, and a look at the firefox plugin,
someone will know if this is doable in emacs. I haven't dealt with
elisp much at all, so some pointers would be welcome.

I actually use this "side tab" behavior in maybe 4 different editors,
so I'd like to work out something similar if possible, as I am very
used to it, and like it.

For the time being I have tabbar turned on.

Thanks,
Brendan

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> wrote:
> Brendan Miller <catphive@catphive.net> writes:
>
>> when I launch emacs I'd like to keep a permanent buffer list open to
>> one side, so I can visually keep track of what buffers I have open,
>> without opening and closing the buffer list.
>>
>> Is there some customisation out there like that, or can someone give
>> pointers on the elisp to open an emacs window on startup and populate
>> it with a buffer list, or ibuffer, or whatever?
>>
>> Basically, I want this to perform the save function that tabs would
>> i.e. letting me visually keep track of what files/buffers I have open
>> and switch between them with a mouse click. I figure a buffer list
>> would be better for keeping track of a large number of buffers, that
>> would overflow on a tabbar.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Brendan
>>
>
> I suspect you will tire of that quite soon because of the excessive
> screen real estate it consumes - emacs has a very fast buffer display
> facility you might consider trying (the open buffers list is quite large
> normally because of temp files etc),
>
> I use this
>
> (defalias 'list-buffers 'ibuffer)
> (setq ibuffer-shrink-to-minimum-size t)
> (setq ibuffer-always-show-last-buffer nil)
> (setq ibuffer-sorting-mode 'recency)
> (setq ibuffer-use-header-line t)
>
>
> and
>
> C-x C-b runs the command list-buffers, which is an alias for `ibuffer'
> in `emacs-init.el'.
>
> A hot key to open, and a single key to close.
>
> As a new Emacs user you might also consider the excellent ido-mode. My
> settings for it are simply
>
> (require 'ido)
> (ido-mode)
>
> best of luck!
>
> --
> Google Talk : rileyrgdev@googlemail.com  http://www.google.com/talk
> O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org
>
>
>
>

gedit_buffers.png
Description: PNG image