Emacs 30.1 highlight - intuitive tab line

The first Emacs 30.0.91 pretest for what will be the 30.1 release of Emacs was announced on the mailing list a few days ago. I was going through the NEWS file, and found something that I've wanted in Emacs for a while now.

One of the niggles I had with Emacs was its tab behavior. It worked differently from how other applications that I'm used to work (firefox, kitty, etc).

In emacs, tab-per-buffer can be achieved by using the tab-line-mode. But, before now, it had the following problems:

1. Since tab-line-mode listed buffers sorted by recently visited, so the order or tabs kept changing
2. There was no wrap-around when trying to go to the next tab from the last tab

Here's a video showing the old behavior:

To solve this, there is package called intuitive-tab-line-mode that solves the above two problems. But, I had problems with it because it did not work well with the beframe package that I also use.

Now, with Emacs 30.1, this behavior is what comes out-of-the-box with Emacs. The only config needed is to enable global-tab-line-mode. And because it's built-in, it works with other modes like beframe.

Here's my config for minimal intuitive per-buffer tabs in Emacs >= 30.0.91:

(use-package tab-line
  :demand t
  :bind
  (("C-<iso-lefttab>" . tab-line-switch-to-prev-tab)
   ("C-<tab>" . tab-line-switch-to-next-tab))
  :config
  (global-tab-line-mode 1)
  (setq
   tab-line-new-button-show nil
   tab-line-close-button-show nil))

Here, I've also added keybindings to switch to next/prev tab using C-TAB and C-S-TAB keys.

More details about this change can be found in it's bug report mail thread.

Aside: why show buffers as tabs

One of the common questions is the need to show buffers as tabs at all. After all, in a long running Emacs session, there might be hundreds of buffers, and showing all of them as tabs becomes useless.

For me, I find that I usually work on a 2 to 5 buffers for a "purpose" at a time. These might be some files on a project I'm working on, or org-agenda + a couple of org files, or mu4e-main + headers + one or two emails and a reply. When in this mode, I think looking at all of these buffers in the tab bar gives me a good understanding of where I am in the project and makes it easy to switch to the next or previous buffer easily.

I also use frames and beframe to make sure that only a single "project" is showing in a frame at a time. So, even if there are hundreds of buffers in my Emacs session, only a handful are shown as tabs. This makes it useful to me without overwhelming me with too many tabs.