🥩 Red Meat Friday: Why Use Tabs

When I wasn’t paying attention, someone decided that what Emacs really needed was Tabs¹. The next thing I knew, they were a feature of Emacs. To flog a tired meme, this brought to mind fish and bicycles. I just don’t understand it. As far as I’m concerned, fish can make better use of bicycles than I can of Tabs in Emacs.

Of course, lots of people disagree. Those people are all exclaiming, “It’s about time!” One of those people is Benjamin Leis who has embraced Tabs and even made customizations to optimize them for his workflow. He’s received a bit of pushback so he made a video to give his answers to the common objections to Tabs and to showcase his workflow.

It’s an impressive setup and if you like that sort of thing, you should take a look at the video and his configuration, which he links in the comments. You may even find yourself convinced.

I didn’t. It runs against everything I believe constitutes efficient text editing. For me, every mouse use is a cache miss. If my fingers leave the keyboard—even for the arrow keys—it feels like a failure. Leis’ workflow is perfect for someone who would really like to spend all their time in the browser. Every action involves a mouse click and you needn’t touch the keyboard unless you want to enter text. There are some—serious people like Rob Pike—who claim this is more efficient. They’re wrong.

I’ll say it again: if you take your hands off the keyboard, you’re sacrificing efficiency for… What? Using an interface designed for your Aunt Millie? The WIMP interface is fine for those who don’t code or write for a living but if you are one who does, maybe you should get serious about how you use your tools.

UPDATE [2024-04-27 Sat 11:31]: There are a lot of nice comments that discuss the benefits of Tabs and how to use them without the mouse. You should definitely look through them because they give you the other perspective on using Tabs.