I would move to Spacemacs if it had the possibility for using a tabbed interface similar to GVim's. Ideally something already built in, mature, and one which wouldn't need any hand holding during operation.
Vim's tabbed interface is quite good, it's basically Vim + a Vim-specific stacking window manager.
There is such support in Spacemacs, it is called "spacemacs layouts" but the tab is visible only on demand while pressing `SPC l`.
Eyebrowse is also integrated in Spacemacs layouts so you can have multiple sub-layouts for a given layouts. Note that Spacemacs layouts also achieve buffer isolation so you can have a layout restricted to project's buffers only, you can also create your own rules to automatically add buffers to some layouts (called custom layouts).
Last you can persist Spacemacs layouts across sessions.
Layouts are fucking great. I have a moderately complex layout set up for my org-mode workflow (tasks list top left, agenda top center, notes file top right, kanban board bottom-left, and a scratch buffer bottom right), and they all load the same way every time. And I have project-specific layouts that get auto-loaded when I open that projectile project, and I have a general programming one as well. All of these took less than an hour to set up and work completely flawlessly.
I don't have the dotfile up anywhere, but I can run you through the basics really quickly:
* SPC-l gives you the layouts micro-state, which allows you to do all of this. First, set up your layout however you'd like, then open up the micro-state and run the save-as command (SPC-l-S) and that will allow you to save the layout to a layouts file somewhere deep in the bowels of Spacemacs.
* When you're ready to use your layout, use SPC-l-L to load the layout from a file. Type its name (Helm is used, so you get narrowing/fuzzy-find for free) and the layout will load. Note that if you already had another layout loaded, it will load it to the next workspace (accessible through SPC-l-<workspace-number>).
Spacemacs layouts are like having clippy in your text editor. "It looks like you're opening a tab, would you like to continue?", "What would you like to name this tab?". Vim just opens a tab.
(I see you've edited your comment meanwhile but I'll leave my comment here for reference)
I've seen some of these but I don't think any of them actually follow the tabbed interface paradigm:
* visible tab bar, preferably at the top and preferably style-able so that it doesn't look like it's out of Windows 3.11
* dynamic tab names based on file contents (in case of multiple buffers, show the name of the currently focused buffer), so that there's no need for manual tab name management
* tab navigation through shortcuts (open tab, close tab, move tab left/right, etc.)
Sorry for edit. I found and installed evil-tabs after replying and it's actually quite good.
It meets all the points you raised, and I agree with them - I prefer evil-tabs for that reason. Although I must that admit that evil-tabs only implements only crucial subset of all vim tabs features mentioned in http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Using_tab_pages .
I tried that. Evil seems to mess up on things now and then. Clicking the mouse acts as a command or something, wiping out ".". And macros, now and then, act up. As in, they won't record properly or something. On large Rust files, things grind to a halt if I run a macro on every line, whereas in Vim proper, things always stay speedy.
In concept though, it is the best solution. Maybe I just have a broken config or something.
> And macros, now and then, act up. As in, they won't record properly or something.
What you may be experiencing is an erroneous action stopping the macro. For example, if you press h at the beginning of the line, macro recording would be stopped. To make this behaviour less annoying add: (setq evil-kbd-macro-suppress-motion-error t) .
- yes, for huuuge files I still use vim
- Occasional bugs due happen, as in every editor running custom plugins. In emacs debugging and editing plugins code is natural. You can use emacs to debug itself and reload parts of code without restarting.
I couldn't deal with Vintageous or Vintage. The lack of a proper ex-line for me kills it, along with spotty support for certain visual-mode movements. The rough edges are right at the forefront all the time when I try.
I'm a big fan of evil-mode as well, though for some things they can't decide if they want to be just like vim or not (One example is whether or not yanking to the default register goes to the clipboard).
For me yanking with `y` copies to my system clipboard. I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with evil; I think it's an emacs setting. Perhaps one of these?
I want to use org-mode as well so I tried the switch to evil/spacemacs, but slight differences in keybindings and behaviors between evil and vim were enough to turn me off.
Magit and org-mode are worth it.