[oblio]

The worst part for me is that I wanted a few "simple" UI tweaks with Emacs. I really wanted to use it.

But I wanted it to have a native tab bar and I wanted to move the command bar at the top, with dropdowns instead of "expand-ups" (turns out, I read right-to-left, top-down, not right-to-left, bottom-up. You can't have either of those, in the world's most extensible editor :-(

[tmtvl]

Emacs has had tab-bar-mode since 27.1 and tab-line-mode since 27.2. As for the drop-down minibuffer (I suspect that's what you mean by "command bar"), you can use something like vertico-posframe* and put it at the top like so:

  (setq vertico-posframe-poshandler #'posframe-poshandler-frame-top-center)

* https://github.com/tumashu/vertico-posframe