I've found tabs to not scale as a UI idiom, generally. They're ok for up to about 10 documents, after that, I'm looking for something else.
I normally use IntelliJ with two panes open, and about 120 tabs between the two of them. But because IntelliJ tabs can't scroll and Java filenames are long, the tab I want to switch to is never visible, and the tab list dropdown is painful to scan. C-n and C-S-n are what I end up using.
And for the browser, I use tree-style tabs. The hierarchy keeps related tabs together, and I can collapse when I do a context switch. The fact I can see all the (top-level) tabs at once in a long list means spatial memory works better.
In emacs, I use Helm and Projectile, bound to F11 and F12 for buffer and project searches. I've bound buffer switching to C-prior and C-next (those are PgUp and PgDown), and since the buffer order is basically a LIFO of whatever buffer you jumped to, the buffer you're looking for is usually within easy scrolling reach.
I'm curious. Do you end up with so many tabs open because you don't bother to close them when you're finished with them? Or is there another reason?
I also use a really big amount of open tabs in my web browsers (I group them in different windows). On IntelliJ, though, I use tabs as my "working area", and it never spans more than 8-10 files. It helps me keep my commits small and focused, never touching too many files.
PS: You can disable tabs entirely by setting tab placement to "None".
I can only see three to five tab titles at a time per pane given the screen width and long class names, and I'm generally navigating across 10+ files at a time (jumping to definition and uses, usually). This means the right tabs are never available for me to click on, so I just ignore the tab bar altogether for selection purposes. And since I never close them, the open set expands to my working set including reference code.
I can't hide the tab bar because I need it to control which pane a file is showing in. E.g. I want test and implementation visible at the same time; this usually requires that I drag one or the other tab to the other pane, because IntelliJ brings tabs to the front of whatever pane they're already living in, rather than moving them to the currently focused pane.
I do my commits from magit in emacs. I generally don't commit at all until I've done something somewhat significant, but I'll break it down into commits on a diff hunk by hunk basis, which magit makes easy. I don't use the IntelliJ SCC tooling.
In the current reality as it is tabs seem an essential part of a web browser and some other apps. But I feel like tabs should not be done by any app - a window manager is to take care of this IMHO.
I especially don't like tabs in IntelliJ Idea: I never (except the cases when I want to detach one to a separate window) actually use them, every time I want to switch to a particular file in a project I choose it in the project tree in the left panel, the tabs only pile up atop of the editor pane and annoy me so I close them every now and then.
Hey, I'm with you in feeling that tabs are essential to web browsing but that they should ideally be the window manager's responsibility. For a while I used surf [1] (which lacks tabs) and the i3 window manager, but for various reasons I wanted to move back to Firefox.
I made a very simple webextension that disables tabs in firefox, so that I can use my window manager's tabs instead. I've been using it since the stable release of Firefox 57. http://static.adrusi.com/notable.html
I normally use IntelliJ with two panes open, and about 120 tabs between the two of them. But because IntelliJ tabs can't scroll and Java filenames are long, the tab I want to switch to is never visible, and the tab list dropdown is painful to scan. C-n and C-S-n are what I end up using.
And for the browser, I use tree-style tabs. The hierarchy keeps related tabs together, and I can collapse when I do a context switch. The fact I can see all the (top-level) tabs at once in a long list means spatial memory works better.
In emacs, I use Helm and Projectile, bound to F11 and F12 for buffer and project searches. I've bound buffer switching to C-prior and C-next (those are PgUp and PgDown), and since the buffer order is basically a LIFO of whatever buffer you jumped to, the buffer you're looking for is usually within easy scrolling reach.