I’m using Obsidian for mathematics, so I frequently like to refer to other notes while writing a new one. Sometimes I have to search around for the note I want, e.g. looking for a particular comment about a specific theorem, or looking for a note about an object. The fact that the default is to open in your current tab keeps making me lose my place and is pretty disruptive for me. I’m not used to locking tabs or holding down CTRL, which would fix this issue. Perhaps I could learn the muscle memory, or whatever.
Fortunately, searching “open in new tab” in the community plugins yielded two plugins to do exactly this, but neither works on search results, which doesn’t help me much.
Perhaps it’s time to learn how to develop Obsidian Plugins
Also, I found a temporary solution until Obsidian add this functionality natively. There is a plugin called Open in new tab by Patrick Lee. Here is the GitHub Repo
Hi folks, I would also love this feature. In fact I would love to have the same behaviour obsidian has with tab than others IDE: opening a file from the file explorer should open a new tab or redirect to the tab if it’s already open.
Thanks for sharing this plugin. So simple and yet, 3 years and almost 170 comments later asking for this feature, no one at the Obsidian team thought this was a good feature to be native.
It’s really sad to see that the guys at Obsidian rely so much on other developers creating plugins in order to make their product good enough…
Really appreciate you sharing this, because it’s indeed a thing that doesn’t make sense, not having an option to toggle this behavior on or off
“Hasn’t been implemented” doesn’t mean “no one at the Obsidian team thought this was a good feature to be native”. There are hundreds of feature requests.
I sorted the feature requests by their comment amounts and this feature is the 5th most wanted feature in the list which also appears to be the easiest-to-implement amongst others. So it seems to be a low hanging fruit with maximum ROI.
File Explorer Custom Sort (254 comments)
Obsidian for web (193 comments)
Add support for link types (182 comments)
Tag Mass Action: Add, Rename, and Delete a tag in multiple files (172 comments)
Click links/files to open in new tab by default (169 comments)
This list raises the following questions:
What’s the point of having this thread if users are not listened to?
How is hundreds of feature requests a valid excuse for not being able to prioritize a feature request when it’s really easy to sort these requests by most-wanted to least-wanted and go from there?
How is 3 years not enough to even prioritizethe 5th most wanted feature (not even talking about the implementation)? We can literally sit down together and finish prioritizing 100 features in a single workday. This is coming from a person who works in big tech doing such prioritizations, so I’m familiar with such decision making processes.
Who gets to decide what’s important or not?
What is your process to make that decision?
What is the process for adding a feature to the roadmap?
And most importantly what else does the community have to do to get this into the road map (if there’s anything they can do…)?
I really hope we can get an answer to all these, or at least some sort of explanation of why just the prioritization process takes 3 years. I’m genuinely asking to start a conversation about fixing something that looks really bad from the outside, not just criticizing. The reply doesn’t have to be on this thread either.
To be clear, it’s not my process — I’m just a volunteer moderator. (I realize the question may be addressed rhetorically to the team, not to me.)
“Fifth highest number of comments” doesn’t equal “fifth most wanted”. It’s not meaningless but a variety of things can influence comment count, including how much back-and-forth discussion there is. And if it were the fifth most-wanted, it probably hasn’t occupied that position for all 3 years.
Lack of a feature doesn’t mean “users aren’t being listened to”. WhiteNoise is in the thread responding and asking for clarification.
Also, the “Open in New Tab” and “No Dupe Leaves” plugins exist, which reduces the request’s urgency.
Seems pretty ridiculous that such an obvious and easy to implement feature hasn’t been added. This isn’t a sophisticated feature that would require a ton of development
My reasoning for wanting this feature is that I am used with development editors like Sublime Text, Xcode where files are almost always opened in new tabs, and I find it hard to navigate Obsidian intuitively.
