Most people in word have 1-2 documents open at once. Most people in text editors like gedit, kate, eclipse, VS have maybe 10 or 20 tabs But most emacs users have at least 80 or 90 buffers open! It's an interesting phenomena that I haven't seen elsewhere. Why is this? Are tabs too much overhead or does emacs have really good buffer management?
Not a criticism, I'm slowly picking up some emacs after 2 years of vi, and I'd like to understand more of the nuances.
I haven't met many people who casually use emacs (other than those trying it out for the firs time, or giving it another shot, (or another, or another))
For those who really GET emacs, and think in emacs, it becomes their entire workflow - as they can automate everything from emacs, incrementally. Those guys that work with 80 or 90 buffers open didn't start out that way - they grew over the years to working that way by tweaking more and more functionality to bend it to their will.
You can extend lots of editors - but there's something about emacs and it's lisp nature that lends itself to this kind of developer.
Also, hippie-expand will expand to stuff contained in open buffers.
To view Emacs as an editor, while technically accurate is not necessarily a fair comparison because it does so much more.
The reason it does not happen with gedit & kate is that tab-based interface fall into uselessness with too many tabs, if they do not provide alternative methods of navigating them than "click on the right one".
IMO, of course.