A random guess at the real problem: you have not found a way to efficiently navigate multi-file projects, and thus end up opening tons of tabs. I was going to r

A random guess at the real problem: you have not found a way to efficiently navigate multi-file projects, and thus end up opening tons of tabs. I was going to recommend ctags, but apparently you've already found it (you know about the extremely useful Ctrl-], Ctrl-t?); I've heard people recommend cscope (although I wouldn't run it on untrusted source code), and I'm sure there are other options. If this is indeed the real issue, try to fix that first.