Re: Feeling lost without tabs

[Robert Thorpe]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:
> Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com> writes:
...
> I was thinking from the user's perspective. For
> example, I did some configuration to the
> Buffer menu [1] - perhaps those exact things are already
> in some of the other alternatives, that I didn't know
> of?

Yes, ibuffer has some similar features to the ones you've configured
into buffer-menu.

> I didn't study the code like you did, so I'm not saying
> what is the case here - it may be, it isn't in any way
> as I describe it.

As I said, three of the buffer menus mentioned are really the same:
buffer-menu, buffer-menu-other-window and list-buffers.  One,
electric-buffer-list is a keymap variant that depends on the other.
That's not really much repetition.

Personally, I like that they've kept the old ones around because I'm
used to them, as I expect a lot of users are.

That said, ibuffer is separate.  In other areas of Emacs this problem is
worse.  For example there are four code-folding systems and they're all
separate (a simple one in simple.el, hide-show-mode, outline-minor-mode
and allout-mode).  I don't like the profliteration of different browsers
and email systems either.  I'm not going to complain too much though,
because I'm not doing anything about it.  In lots of these cases it
happene because the features started off as independently developed
libraries and were added into Emacs later.

> On the other hand, the only thing that seem to differ
> (that has been mentioned so far) are the keys and the
> way the windows behave. Isn't that typically something
> that should be configurable, not reasons to fork?

Sometimes having a set of different functions that do things slightly
differently is the way that Emacs provides for customization.  To give
another example, C-j will make a newline and indent the next line.
There's a function called reindent-then-newline-and-indent which can be
used instead by remapping it to C-j.

> [1] http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/dumps/buffer_menu.png
>     http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/conf/emacs-init/buffer-menu.el

I like that, I think using different colours is useful.

BR,
Robert Thorpe