As I’ve said before, I’m not a fan of the Emacs Tab bar. Plenty of serious people disagree so it boils down to a matter of taste rather than virtue. Grant Rosson is a case in point.
Rosson is a Philosophy professor and a serious Emacs user—and so one more data point in the argument that Emacs is not just for technical users—who likes to organize his lecture notes as a bespoke set of tabs for each lecture.
The problem is that there’s no way of saving that tab bar configuration. Since he sometimes gives the same lecture more than once a week, he needed a way of saving and restoring his configurations. But, of course, this is Emacs so if you need some functionality, you can almost always add it. Note, again, that Rosson is a Philosophy professor not a developer but like many Emacs users he has nevertheless learned enough Elisp to customize Emacs to his liking.
The result was tab-sets.el, a utility that saves and restores tab sets. It was just what he needed. When he had to give a lecture again, he simply restored the tab set and had all the necessary files right there at his disposal. If you like tab bars and sometimes want to recreate them, take a look at Rosson’s post and code.
I love this type of story. Someone far removed from the engineering milieu is not only a dedicated Emacs user but has mastered it enough to make his own non-trivial customizations. The down side is that it makes me even less tolerant of people who are in engineering and whine that Emacs is too hard and that they don’t have time to learn it. Rosson stands as a damning repudiation of that.