RE: Feeling lost without tabs

[Drew Adams]

> I'm slowly migrating from notepad++ to emacs.

Sounds good.  Come on in.  Enjoy.

> I feel a bit lost because emacs doesn't show tabs. I work on
> multiple projects, I get distracted by various things,

Who doesn't? ;-)

> but when I come back to the seat it is the tabs that
> remind me which project I was last working on.

A couple of things...

1. Many (most?) Emacs users do not quit Emacs and restart it
often.  So after they get distracted by other things or take a
break, and then come back to Emacs, they come back to the same
Emacs session and they see where they left off.

2. Beyond that, there are many ways Emacs can help you organize
and keep track of projects.  Different users use different ways,
and sometimes different ways for different sets of projects.

Emacs Wiki has info that users have offered about how they work
with projects.  It can be a good place to start.  This page in
particular links to lots of info about using Emacs with projects:
http://www.emacswiki.org/CategoryProject

Wrt sets of buffers, Eli mentioned separate frames, which is one
way to group buffers into sets.  With Emacs 24.4 you can even
save frame sets persistently (as part of saved Emacs desktops),
so you can come back to them in a later Emacs session.  (But
that won't help much with some buffers that are not associated
with files.)

Another way to define sets of buffers (or files or...) is to
use Emacs bookmarks.  Like Emacs desktops, bookmarks can be
persistent (they are by default).

If you use library Bookmark+, http://www.emacswiki.org/BookmarkPlus
then you can have desktop bookmarks, which means that by hitting
a key you can switch to a different set of frames, buffers, etc.
Bookmark+ also lets you tag bookmarks in arbitrary ways, which
defines different sets of bookmarks (hence different sets of
files, directories, projects,...).

There are really quite a few things that Emacs has to offer in
the way of organizing projects.  And for just switching among
buffers (which is where this thread started).

Start with something like `tabbar.el' if it is close to what
you are used to and what you like.  But I think you will sooner
or later try other things that offer you more features for
navigating and organizing projects.

(Oh, and try starting Emacs once and leaving it running...
Emacs is not Notepad or notepad++.)