Re: Separate area at the top for a serious tab bar

[Jay Kamat]

Hi,

R. Diez writes:

> I just do not want to live without one. Therefore, I am a long-time user of
> tabbar.el . I have installed several little enhancements and hacked together
> some dodgy Lisp code over the years. It is a problematic solution that still
> frustrates me on a regular basis.

As someone who has come from other editors (originally eclipse, intellij, and
atom), and has thought the exact same thing (that a tabbar is a necessity for
an editor), I know how you feel. I would highly reccomend giving the buffer
based workflow a try, however. Once I tried seriously dropping tabs, I can't
imagine going back to a tabbed workflow.

> I am no Lisp expert, but I am sure that many smarter people would quickly
> write a better tab bar package if given a good chance. My bet is that
> something is holding them back.

tabbar.el has many issues with it implementation wise. I think that if someone
did a full audit of it and cleaned out the bugs and fixed the performance
issues, it would handle a lot nicer, even without any changes on the Emacs
side. I think that most of the bugs in the issue tracker are fixable purely in
elisp:

https://github.com/dholm/tabbar/issues

> The reason may be the lack of a separate area for a tab bar. If I remember
> correctly, the current tabbar.el steals an area designed for displaying a
> ruler. This stealing causes problems, because the handling of that area is
> not flexible enough and yields trouble here and there. It is not a good
> basis to build upon.

See `tabbar-local-mode', which I found works well even when the header line is
used. See it's docstring for more information on that. When I used tabbar, I
just turned off the header for all the modes I used and used tabbar-local-mode
when that option wasn't available.


I actually wrote a blog post about my feelings on this topic earlier, maybe
you would find some interesting ideas in it:

http://jgkamat.gitlab.io/blog/emacs-tabs.html

My tabbar configuration is here; if you decide to continue using tabbar, you
may find some useful things in it:

https://gitlab.com/jgkamat/dotfiles/blob/13da6a341688e5fb1e74d6521dc9a3a941dd0cde/emacs/.emacs.d/lisp/tabbar-tweaks.el

-Jay