Re: Gtk tabs in emacs, new branch

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Uwe Siart writes:
 > Angelo Graziosi <address@hidden> writes:
 > 
 > > Perhaps we need something like 'M-x tabs-mode' (by default possibly!
 > > :-))
 > 
 > Please don't enable such stuff by default. The user should be able to
 > decide by himself how many frames/windows/(tabs) he would like to
 > open.

Opening many frames or windows is annoying to me, because I invariably
have too many open when I shut down for whatever reason. and they can
take up a lot of screen/frame real estate.  If I'm going to have tabs
for 99.9% of a session though, I'm just as happy having the tabs at
startup as long as the top tab is sane (typically defined as "the
selected tab in the selected frame at close-and-save time").  The
extra 1.5 or 2 lines of text is almost never an issue.

I think this is an even better candidate for "try as default and wait
for screams of pain" than delete-selection-mode.  People who hate it
will only have to turn it off once.  Many people who might love it
won't find out about it for years if it's not default.

BTW, at one time I had the same intuition you do.  Then XEmacs put in
tabs and enabled them by default.  What I discovered is that at
startup, the window I was working in *last* is a very good candidate
for top tab, and it's at the top of buffer-list.  What surprised me is
that the second-to-last window was typically not a good guess for the
second most important; rather it was often buried down the list at
fifth or sixth.  Tabs made it quite easy to find those precisely
because they're in-your-face.

iswitch and friends might make that advantage quite small for most
users; I don't know.  On the other hand, the actual cost is *very*
small if you're going to enable tabs anyway.