So here’s a snapshot of what is possible today: Grouping Windows That means you may not need a third-party window management library – if you ever tried to use one, that is – for most things. Modern Emacs is now able to mirror the paneling so beloved of IDE users, and without the tears! And you can easily control how or where buffers and windows must go, giving you even more control over your Emacs experience. Historically it was a rather difficult affair to control window and buffer placement as you’d have to rein in a cavalcade of variables and functions and hope they did what you wanted. They’re one of Emacs’s greatest assets, and they’re highly configurable. M-x tab-bar-mode adds tab-style window configurations to Emacs, and M-x tab-line-mode a way of browsing visible buffers.īack to windows. Later on, tabs also joined the family business.

But few do, and the baleful support for frames in regular window managers nix any temptation to make it work. Frames are just that much harder to deal with - unless you’re using an actual tiling window manager, of course. I’m sure you, like me, eschew frames in favor of windows. And thanks to a number of consolidations and improvements, it’s no longer the indomitable black box it once was.Īt some point in the distant past, Emacs got into the business of handling frames. There, it’s out now I said it now everybody knows. Emacs is a fantastic tiling window manager, and not enough people know that.

Window management