Re: Tab bar

[Juri Linkov]

> I think someone's already mentioned this several threads ago: there
> needs to be some clear separation of concerns regarding "tab bars"
>
> tabs in tab bars themselves are just gui widgets nothing more -  Indeed
> much like icons in tool bars, just drawn a bit differently.  I don't
> see why emacs shouldn't support a tab bar GUI widget or multiple widgets

We already have a suitable infrastructure of graphical primitives to
implement a tab bar on top of it.  It is required to have graphical
areas attached to window edges that can contain a row of bitmaps
bound to some commands.  This functionality is already supported by the
header line and window fringes.  It seems what we need is to improve
them to attach arbitrary number of header lines and fringes to a window,
and to render text (tab names) using specified fonts on these
graphical elements.

> (say toplevel tab bar for each toplevel frame, and tab bars for each
> window (emacs window), perhaps with configurable positions)

Since we need both types, maybe we should implement also the frame
header line and frame fringes?

> (Personally I've always considered the top-level-frame-switcher sort of
> tab bar rightly a tabbing WM's job (e.g. pwm), really, but that's not
> the way people went for the most part, presumably since you don't see
> tabbing WMs on windows/mac -  but if you're using a tabbing WM, then
> multiple emacs toplevel frames can _already_ be tabbed between in the
> "one" window system window, and the advent of browser "tabs" was pretty
> uninteresting too...)

I think tab bars are popular because they contain only elements of the
current program without stuff from other programs in their lists.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/