I often work with what’s effectively an ideas/notes file and a draft file, switching back and forth between the two, and my notes get very lengthy, so it’s frustrating when I have to scroll back down and find my place because I accidentally clicked a link. (I also often avoid using panes for this, because my notes are frequently dataview-query-heavy and having two open at once on my iPad Pro makes the text input laggy).
I’ve been using Obsidian since long before tabs and split panes were released. I still find myself accidentally navigating away from where I want to be, and being surprised by the link-following behaviour (especially when combined with split panes, because I will have been typing in one, and then scroll through another and click a link in it, and it replaces the content in the file I was typing in instead of opening a new tab / replacing the content in the one I clicked. I get why it does that but I still haven’t adjusted).
I also don’t think a browser’s behaviour is relevant, any more than Slack’s behaviour is relevant. It serves a different purpose and different workflows.
I just want to add that “IDE navigation” would also be very useful in the context of Canvas.
I’ve recently been using the Canvas as a spatial way of organizing my notes on a subject/project. I usually have the most important/active notes open in their own tabs while the Canvas is open split to the side. It would be very intuitive and simple UX to click a note in Canvas to switch to its tab. But now it always opens a new tab, which makes this whole workflow much less useful. I need to manually hunt for the tab of the note I want to edit. This is something the computer should do, not me.
I think the whole UX design question here is very simple: If a user already has a note open in a tab, do they want to open a duplicate tab when clicking a link to the note? What is the use case for this behavior? I think the use case where they would want to open a duplicate tab is very rare, so it should not be the default behavior.
BTW, it seems like the “No Dupe Leaves” (hacky) plugin also stopped working in 1.3.5, so now I’m back to the default behavior, which is totally messing up my workflow :-/
The plugin stopped duplicate tabs opening from links inside the notes, but not elsewhere. It was still a considerable improvement.
Huge plus 1 for this. I am constantly having to close out duplicative tabs.
The editor routing to an already open instance of the linked note is my expected behavior.
It would also make my pinned tabs more useful—today, I end up with more duplicates when I pin notes because of the default behavior to navigate to the referenced note in the current pane.
+1 Obsidian is great, however I do believe it’d be much smarter with this option.
Community plugins are a big part of the appeal for this app and I can see this feature benefitting interactions with these plugins as well.
As an example my homepage automatically pins when opened.
It would be easier to manage if only one of these homepages could be open at a time.
I believe this could even have a bearing on performance and memory as it could reduce refreshing of executed code. We would save on executions per page from plugins like templater/dataview!
I appreciate all the time and effort devs put into this tool and I’m thankful feedback is being listened to by your team!
Especially in cases like this, where this request would help our overall goals of note management.
I look forward to future updates to this wonderful app!
+1 for this feature. I find it very odd if I already have a tab open then I use the quick switcher it either changes the current tab to a duplicate of the one I already have opened OR if the current tab is pinned it opens a new tab that is a duplicate of what I wanted to switch to rather than switching to the already open tab. Seems like the default behavior should be to re-use tabs unless I’m holding a modifier key in which case it would open a duplicate.
If you like, you could help me test-drive my own implementation, Mononote. It’s still in development, I’m using it on a daily basis for 2 months by now. Works in 1.3 and 1.4, for links clicked, history palette, Omnisearch, you name it.
Use it w/ BRAT, GitHub link is https://github.com/czottmann/obsidian-mononote, the current version is 0.1.6.
Oh, that sounds awesome! I installed BRAT, but when I try to install Mononote, it complains: “The release is not complete and cannot be download. main.js is missing from the release”
Ahh OK, BRAT is new to me… But I got it installed now! At first glance it seems to work great, but I’ll keep testing it.
The opened filename is briefly seen in the selected tab before it moves to the right one, but this is only a small cosmetic issue, and I suspect you probably had to implement it this way in order to get this functionality working at all
Yes, it can only react to a file being opened or a tab being created after the fact, that’s the explanation for the short “flicker”. Glad you like it, let me know if you run into any issues or have suggestions!
Mega +1 for this! (racking my brain to think of a synonym for huge, massive, large, big so I went across the pond and borrowed from our British friends…)
This is one of the few things in Obsidian that gets me multiple times/day. As the day goes on, I’m often surprised to find I’ve 3-4 tabs of the same reference note open. Multiply that by several reference notes and it explains why my tabs quickly become so small I can’t even make out the first letter of the tab title. For long reference notes, it’s also inconvenient to have to find your scroll location again because new tabs always open the doc scrolled to the top (as you’d expect).
I don’t see a conflict with the “open in new tab” (Ctrl/Command) modifier for Open Quickly. The only time I want a duplicated tab is to open the current tab in side-by-side split but there are already commands for this: Split Right, Split Down. It doesn’t make sense to me to have multiple tabs of the same doc open unless in split view. So my vote is for the Quick Opener to always open an existing tab if it exists, have a setting to determine this behavior, or have another modifier key available so the user decides each time.
