Tabbed windows on Emacs

Question

I'm trying to get multiple tabs in windows like vim does it. In vim tabs aren't tied to buffers and you can have multiple tabs each with multiple splits and buffers in them. What I've found so far is:

• tabbar: shows all tabs.
• winring: doesn't show tabs in the window and is clunky to use (have to name each tab first). This is the closest to what I want.

Does anyone have any ideas if this is possible? Tabs + emacs is hard to search for; most of what I find are discussions of spaces vs tabs :)

Update: This pic http://christianrobinson.name/images/vim7-split-tabs.png shows the kind of thing I want. Multiple tabs and a bunch of split buffers on each tab.

Answer 1

tabbar is by far the most popular package I think, but only shows tabs for buffers with the same mode you're editing (for instance, if you're working in a file in python-mode, it'll show tabs for all python-mode buffers only). That's the default behavior anyway; I'm pretty sure you could customize that if you wanted to. But my impression is that a popular way to manage multiple buffers in Emacs is with ibuffer and ido-mode. For instance, my .emacs customizations include

(require 'ido)
(ido-mode t)
(global-set-key "\C-x\C-b" 'ibuffer)

Answer 2

You can do C-x 4 c to clone a buffer : create an indirect buffer that is a twin copy of the current buffer. It allows you to show the same buffer with different major-mode enabled in different windows.

Then with tabbar you can have different tabs showing the same buffer in different modes for example.

Answer 3

I use something called ElScreen, which allows me to do what you are looking for. I actually also wanted this feature from VIM as well when I decided to start using Emacs.

The following is the code that I use for ElScreen, I even used the same type of keybindings as you would use in VIM. Control-C, followed by tabe or tabd to emulate the :tabe or :tabd in VIM.

To iterate through the next screen, or tab in this case, I use Control Meta _ and Control Meta +.

;; ---------------------------------------
;; load elscreen
;; ---------------------------------------
(load "elscreen" "ElScreen" t)

;; F9 creates a new elscreen, shift-F9 kills it
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c t a b e") 'elscreen-create)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c t a b d") 'elscreen-kill)

;; Windowskey+PgUP/PgDown switches between elscreens
(global-set-key (kbd "C-M-_") 'elscreen-previous)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-M-+") 'elscreen-next)

Here's an example of the tab setup in action:

First Screen.

Second Screen:

You can have split buffers using C-x3 and C-x2 in a tab :)