emacs-neotree

My Emacs setup typically involves: - An LSP: https://emacs-lsp.github.io/lsp-mode/tutorials/CPP-guide/ - Neotree to browse the file system: https://github.com/jaypei/emacs-neotree - Awesome-tab for tabs: https://github.com/manateelazycat/awesome-tab If you want more, look at the extensions section of the LSP page and then go down the rabbit hole. I likewise do not use Doom or any of the bundled variants because I want full control and understanding of my config. But those variants are still useful to learn what's out there and selectively add things to your mix.

> it felt so constraining not having a tree view and tabs I could click on There are emacs packages for tree views[0] and tabs[1], but as you note the built-in buffer management is more powerful. Stuff like Helm or Ivy is even better! There's also an emacs uuidgen package, which can generate a uuid & insert it with M-x uuidgen; you could of course bind it to a key sequence if you use it frequently. 0: https://github.com/jaypei/emacs-neotree 1: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TabBarMode

Get Emacs and Neotree[1] and start hacking. You'll learn a Lisp, and you'll have a working demo in under a week. [1] https://github.com/jaypei/emacs-neotree

Part of why I switched to emacs was something called helm: https://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html It fuzzy matches almost anything: files, function names, or commands Project grouping in the traditional sense can be done with projectile and NeoTree. http://projectile.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://github.com/jaypei/emacs-neotree/blob/dev/README.md I think what you are describing in the second half can be handled with company mode and triggering a major/minor mode off a file extension. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ma... http://company-mode.github.io If that's not it it's possible Googling will find exactly what you describe. People tend to port anything useful from any editor to emacs.