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

[R. Diez]

Hallo Martin:


> A side window at the top of a frame (see section 28.19
> Side Windows of the Elisp manual) is such an area.
> [...]


Despite my limited Lisp skills, I am still thinking about tab bars. 8-)

In the Emacs manual I found the following:

"Side windows are special windows positioned at any of the four sides of a 
frame’s root window"

You seem to know more than I do, so maybe you can help me save some time 
investigating around.

In NetBeans, you can split the editor vertically and have one tab bar over each 
half. Emacs' tabbar.el uses the "ruler" area, which is (or was?) a special area 
on top of each buffer. This way, each Emacs buffer (or "window") has a tab bar 
at its top. If I split the frame vertically with split-window-below, I get to 
see 2 tab bars.


>From the documentation, I guess I cannot have a "side window" automatically 
>placed on top of each buffer (or "window"), because side windows only apply to 
>entire frames. Is that right?

I have seen that you can nest windows, which are then called "internal 
windows". Would a tab bar based on that be hard to manage? I guess that the tab 
bar would then be another Window as far as Emacs is concerned, so windmove-up 
would then take me to the tabbar over its buffer window, which I do not really 
want. Buffer windows might also get confused if they suddenly move down in the 
window hierarchy in order to make room for a tool bar on top. Any tips on how I 
could approach a new tab bar implementation?


Thanks in advance,
  rdiez