tab-bar-mode: How to change tab bar appearence?

Wanting the tab-bar to look a bit better. Currently on MacOS. Looking at [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html\_node/emacs/Tab-Bars.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Tab-Bars.html) Can't seem to find anything to change the appearance of the buttons to make it look better. Thanks. https://preview.redd.it/ilupnsbfduk81.png?width=888&format=png&auto=webp&s=3cb53064e3739cabff31b1efe2288e0404227c49

On a Mac you may want to try the "Mac Port" aka railwaycat aka Mituharu version: https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport It allows Emacs to take advantage of MacOS's built in tabs, so they match the system chrome, respond to mouse drags, and so on.

If you look in the source (eg `M-x find-library`) you'll find a few `defface`s. Here's an [example customisation from zenburn](https://github.com/bbatsov/zenburn-emacs/blob/cef1e26146c1b8b32fc5ce346f2cfa9861eb67d4/zenburn-theme.el#L1492-L1499).

I'm using emacs-plus such that I can have native-comp enabled.

How do you add a face to an existing theme?

You can just add the defface (with your own tweaks) to your init file, to override the defaults.

There's one main function that tab-bar-mode uses to format the tabs, it's called `tab-bar-tab-name-format-default`. If you `M-x describe-function` on it, you can see the docs, and look at the source. You can then define your own function, and set it as the name formatting function with: (setq tab-bar-tab-name-format-function 'my-tab-bar-name-format) There's also a group variant of this used when tab groups are enabled. [Here](https://github.com/jimeh/.emacs.d/blob/c845af831690d1ab575b691020fbe91ce6435647/modules/workspaces/siren-tab-bar.el#L119-L138) is my personal format function that I'm using right now. It's pretty basic, but does what I want: https://share.jimeh.me/Screen-Shot-2022-03-02-14-08-29.09-PMZkgYQgfYf7.png

This is for tab-line and not tab-bar but I would expect that a lot of these customizations would be similar: [blog post](https://amitp.blogspot.com/2020/06/emacs-prettier-tab-line.html) [preview image](https://www.redblobgames.com/x/screenshots/emacs-tab-line.png)

Another thing you might consider (this depends on how many tabs you usually keep open, etc.) is not displaying tabs in the tab-bar at all `(setq tab-bar-show nil)` and displaying them in the echo-area instead. I use a combination of https://github.com/fritzgrabo/tab-bar-echo-area and https://github.com/qaiviq/echo-bar.el to give a consistent but very unobtrusive presentation of the tabs in the echo bar on the bottom right. You can see that in [this image](https://www.dropbox.com/s/pxv040sow6uwzdv/Screen%20Shot%202022-03-02%20at%2011.08.10.png?dl=0) -- and my config for it is [here](https://github.com/mclear-tools/dotemacs/blob/master/setup-config/setup-tabs.el).

Understood. For what it's worth, the Mac Port recently merged the 28 branch, so native comp is available there. I have not tried it out yet, however.