Sorry for edit. I found and installed evil-tabs after replying and it's actually quite good.
It meets all the points you raised, and I agree with them - I prefer evil-tabs for that reason. Although I must that admit that evil-tabs only implements only crucial subset of all vim tabs features mentioned in http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Using_tab_pages .
For future reference, evil-tabs is just skin over elscreen.
I created tmux-like keybindings, leveraging hydra and helm for some commands: https://gist.github.com/kozikow/58b46c45a2c24406dc7cde3f1861... .
Re:Vim 8.0 released
by SmirkingRevenge on Monday September 12, 2016 @10:34AM
(#12479991)
In emacs, helm-buffer ("<SPC> b b" in spacemacs) has basically replaced tabs for me, and I haven't really missed them.
I've seen some of these but I don't think any of them actually follow the tabbed interface paradigm:
* visible tab bar, preferably at the top and preferably style-able so that it doesn't look like it's out of Windows 3.11
* dynamic tab names based on file contents (in case of multiple buffers, show the name of the currently focused buffer), so that there's no need for manual tab name management
* tab navigation through shortcuts (open tab, close tab, move tab left/right, etc.)