rlazo's blog

Why did I stop using tabs on emacs?

A long (long!) time ago I used to be trapped on the Windows world,
surfing the Web using Microsoft Internet Explorer… and I hated
it. It was an absolute mess having more than 5 windows open, so I
didn’t open more than 3. And then I found Firefox with it’s tabs, I
just loved it.

Fast forward to the present, on almost anything I do using a GUI I
want to be able to use tabs, even on Emacs. I was a huge fan of
elscreen,
it’s a nice package that creates and manages tabs on emacs, nicely
integrated with emacs-w3m (although
emacs-w3m have their own tabs), dired and a few more. I wrote some
elisp code to integrate it with
erc and
jabber.el. So what happen?

ido-mode

Tabs are a great way of organizing and making accessible content, don’t
get me wrong, but on emacs you have the power of the minibuffer, and matching it with
ido-mode feel more emacsy for me than tabs. It does fuzzy
auto-completion on the minibuffer when opening a file or switching
buffers. And when you begin to feeling comfortable using it, tabs (at
least for me) become almost useless.

If what I said earlier doesn’t convince you, I recommend you to watch
Stuart Halloway’s great What You
Can Learn From ido.el. It greatly
motivated me to take a deep look at ido-mode.