Managing Emacs Tabs with 'tab-sets.el'

In Emacs, my text editor of choice, tab-bar-mode lets you replicate something like the experience of using tabs in a web browser. For me, this means opening a lot of tabs with notes, lists, drafts, etc., such that my tab bar becomes a visual buffet of whatever documents are pertinent to the task at hand, be it writing, teaching, coding, whatever.

This works great for me, on a project by project basis. But what if I want to switch to another task or project? What is to become of the perfectly curated set of tabs I have open?

The problem of tab proliferation is a distinctly modern one. Raise your hand if the top of your web browser looks like a graveyard of articles you’ve been meaning to read since the last time your computer crashed. Many browsers have solved this issue by allowing users to save and restore groups of tabs under meaningful names, like “Research Project” or “Articles I Still Won’t Read.” But who does that? (Ok, I do…)

As far as I know,™ Emacs does not offer any built-in way to save and restore a beautifully curated row of tabs. There are many options for saving and restoring activities, workspaces, and frame/buffer configurations. But none that do exactly what I want, namely, allow me to save and later re-open a set of tabs, one file per tab, in a specific order.

So, I wrote tab-sets.el.

I find tab-sets most useful for teaching and writing.

For example: I sometimes teach the same class several times in a week. I therefore often found myself repeating the process of finding and re-opening all the files that I wanted to reference for that class, mostly lecture notes and slides (exported with org-reveal). Because these files can be spread out across my file system, finding and re-opening them is rarely as simple as navigating to a dedicated directory.

Now, with tab-sets.el, I can use a single command, tab-sets-save, to save the current frame’s tabs under a meaningful name, say, “Week 1 Class”, and safely close the frame. When it’s time to teach the same class again, I can call tab-sets-open, select “Week 1 Class,” and find a brand new frame displaying all the tabs exactly as they were when I saved them.

The same process works for quickly returning to a writing project.

A few niceties include:

• minibuffer annotations, offering a preview of each tab set
• optional integration with bookmarks.el, meaning tab sets are accessible as standard bookmarks, through list-bookmarks
• optional integration with embark, meaning you can open, rename, or delete a tab set right from the minibuffer

This package isn’t published anywhere, so install directly, however you want or know how. For example:

(use-package tab-sets
  :ensure nil
  :vc (:url "https://github.com/localauthor/tab-sets")
  :custom
  (tab-sets-data-file "~/.emacs.d/var/tab-sets.eld")
  :config
  (tab-sets-setup-embark))