active-tab-in-front package
This package provides means for a very intuitive workflow in regards to tab (items) management. It's comprised of two concepts: treating the collection of all pane items as a wheel, and being able to easily navigate between a few items under your immediate attention.
Typical workflow
This workflow is comprised entirely using 4 commands:
alt-<N>switch to N-th most recently active itemctrl-p(or other) rotate item "wheel" to the leftctrl-n(or other) rotate item "wheel" to the rightctrl-b(fuzzy-finder:toggle-buffer-finder) bring up a deep item
Most often I use alt-2 through alt-4 to navigate between a few files I'm
attending to.
Remaining commands are used to find something farther down. ctrl-b allows you
to find item by its name but I actually find myself using ctrl-p and
ctrl-n more often.
I also use ctrl-n to "forget" about the item, and ctrl-p to bring it
back. The wheel metaphor is mostly there for intuition, as it is hard to
describe item destination otherwise.
Keymap
I use following snippet to enable the key bindings as described above. You can
add this to keymap.cson (Edit > Keymap). Note: this will override default
commands: fuzzy-finder:toggle-file-finder and application:new-file.
'atom-workspace':
'ctrl-p': 'pane:show-previous-item'
'ctrl-n': 'active-tab-in-front:bury-active-item'