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Separate area at the top for a serious tab bar


From: R. Diez
Subject: Separate area at the top for a serious tab bar
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 07:06:59 +0000 (UTC)

Hi all:


A tab bar is a very important usability element. Virtually every other editor 
has it. For many people, including myself, visual, positional clues makes life 
much easier.

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.

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.

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.

I have just read the following in the Emacs 26.1 change log:

"Emacs now supports optional display of line numbers in the buffer. This is 
similar to what 'linum-mode' provides, but much faster and doesn't usurp the 
display margin for the line numbers."

I guess that there was a similar problem there: the old code had to usurp the 
margin for another purpose.

This is my plea to the Emacs gurus: Implement a suitable area at the top of 
windows/frames/whatever to pave the way for a serious tab bar implementation.

Best regards,
  rdiez


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