[nradov]

Nonsense. I've done it both ways, and doing it the way you describe is actually slower.

[yummyfajitas]

It's slower for small N. That's why emacs has Tabbar mode, which I have bound to \C-Tab.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TabBarMode

Tabbar works great for switching between the 3 haskell files I have open (note: tabbar only switches between files of the same type).

Regular buffer switching (or even better, anything mode http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Anything) works great for switching between the roughly 200 java files I have open right now.

[sjs]

You can bring up Emacs' buffer list sorted with the most recently used at the top (bs-show). This is equivalent to alt-tab in the worst case. Because I can search this list (it's a standard Emacs buffer), I can get to anywhere in the end or middle far faster. You cannot see filenames in alt-tab until you select the icon.

Further, Emacs standard switch-to-buffer command selects the last visited file by default so you can flip between files with C-x b RET. Slightly longer than alt-tab, but not much once it becomes muscle memory.

[michaelcampbell]

Perhaps that says more about the person than the method.