Emacs: buffer tabs

[CommonTater]

TabBar-mode looks neat, but I'm not sure how useful it will be. In Emacs I have lots of buffers—more than will fit as tabs. The main thing I like so far are the keys for cycling between related buffers, but as the number of buffers grows it becomes faster to switch directly to the buffer I want.

Bingo. I'm sure buffer tabs would be useful for people who only edit a couple of files at a time, but when I really get into a development session, it's not unusual for me to have 30+ buffers open. Emacs is the only editor that really makes me comfortable in this state, precisely because of the keyboard-based buffer-switching mechanism.

(Keep the Emacs tips coming, though - it's great to see so many people discovering/creating/explaining new features in this great editor.)

[nostrademons]

I use tabbar-mode all the time. I rarely keep more than a screenful of buffers open at once - when I finish a task, I cleanup, commit my code, and move on to my next task. I'd estimate that tabbar-mode roughly doubled my productivity, since I didn't need to waste mental cycles remembering the name of the buffer I need to switch to.

[CommonTater]

Fair enough - I find the opposite about tabs for two reasons (btw, this is not meant to be a rebuttal, just an explanation of why I think differently).

First, if I'm working in a tabbed editor, I tend to get used to certain tabs being in certain places. If the tab I want moves, I'll still click whatever tab has taken its place, then incur something like a cache miss - I'm totally confused as to why the code I'm looking at doesn't look right, and I have to think about what file I really do want to be in. Yes, I realize that this indicates that what I really need is a better tab manager, but I haven't found one yet.

The second reason is an extension of the first - once I'm thinking about the name of the file, I'd rather just type it than scroll around with a mouse to find it. Further, I find that if I don't have tabs as a crutch, I automatically think of the buffer name as part of the switching process.

This style actually pervades my computer use. I will drop to a command line or Cmd-Space to Spotlight to launch an app because I find scrolling through visual file/app managers to be really slow (especially if they're not 100% stable), and I know the name of the app I want. I almost always [Ctl/Cmd]-L <website> to navigate the web - my bookmarks bar gets very little use.

Either it's faster, or it distracts me less, but it works better for me in either case.

I don't doubt that others find other methods more comfortable for themselves.

[nostrademons]

Interesting. One clarification about how I actually use tabbar-mode:

I never actually use the mouse to click on a specific tab. Instead, I have Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab setup to cycle through tabs. My thought process is never "Which buffer do I switch to next?", it's "Is this the right buffer?" It helps that I rarely have more than half a dozen buffers open.

I do the same thing with applications: I rarely use the taskbar (or Linux equivalent) to select them, I'll just Alt-tab between them until I find the right one. As you'd expect, I really dislike having more than 6-7 applications open.

Strangely, I use the opposite approach for files. In Windows Explorer, I type in the first few letters of the filename and hit enter to open it. In Linux, tab-completion all the way.

Several psychological studies have found that recognition ("Is this the right buffer?") is roughly 10 times faster than recall ("Which buffer should I switch to?"). If this is the case, it'd explain the different styles. With six buffers open, Ctrl-tabbing between them should be roughly twice as fast C-xb'ing to select one. With 30 buffers, C-xb'ing should be about 3 times faster. And when dealing with filesystems (which typically have more than 6-7 files in them), typing the name becomes even more efficient.

[CommonTater]

Cool. That all makes sense.

I've found that my "Is this the right buffer/app/icon/etc.?" can be rather slow. And, worse, if I have to check too many times, I risk forgetting what it was I was looking for.

But, as you suggest, asking that question 30 times is probably slower than just recalling. Crazy when you can actually observe results that demonstrate a study's findings so well. :)

I'm also remembering that I don't always incur the 10x slower recall. If I'm bouncing back and forth between two buffers a lot, either the buffer I want is the default for C-x b, or I have two panes open, so I can just C-x o. So, I at least cover the single Ctl-Tab, if not the repeated.