Please, could you explain precisely why the following behavior:
“When I click on a link it is open in another tab”
really helps your workflow (and I even omit the rest of the FR), instead of:
“When I click on a link it is open in the ?
For what I can see, this is the default behavior in all text editors, so having this stable behavior (which I expected btw) is good, IMO.
there’s also the problem that every time that a new tab opens it will show at the top of the note instead of being where I left last, which is kinda frustrating, specially if is a big note.
and is true that you still can end up with a lot of tabs opened, but if you open always the same tab that is already opened, it will be one less to close. quite often I end up with 3 or 4 tabs of the same note open and this is quite irritating to me.
P.S. One thing I would add, is that even with the IDE-like behavior, I would still like the possibility of opening the same note in more than one tab/window. But to force this we could have some explicit trigger, like a Right-Click + Open in new Window or Tab menu option.
OK, let’s say I have two documents, a planning doc and an ideas doc.
While planning I want to refer to the ideas doc, when I click it, it starts at the top of the document which is super annoying, because now I manually have to scroll to where I was last, OR, I have to manually find the tab where I last edited the ideas doc. This is not a minor use case, it happen multiple times each day.
Sure, browser navigation could be nice as an option if I want to test-browse through a markdown based web site for example, but as the default browsing mode it’s just a terrible idea imo.
It seems to me the current behaviour only works for people who only use short notes, or people who like to manually manage tabs and always remember which documents they have opened or am I missing something here?
For IDE-proponents as myself, it might actually help if you would preserve the cursor and scroll positions for all documents (important: this would have to be done also for closed documents!) Personally, I don’t think I care much about the tabs or IDE-style browsing per se, but it is the tab state that is important.
Tried ‘No Dupe Leaves’ but it only works on links. If I click something in the file browser it doesn’t switch to the existing tab. Still, it’s a step closer to the light, thanks for creating that plugin.
Making it work for all ways a note can be opened and always switch to the existing instance would be wonderful.
Just to add the experience of a random user who has thought about this way less than all of you: I keep ending up with many duplicate tabs of all my files open, and I don’t even know where they are coming from / which action I’m doing that is triggering that. The whole thing is definitely very unintuitive for me. (And yes, it is also not ideal that tabs get squeezed to the point where you can only see the “x”.)
Navigate around pretty aggressively after creating new documents and will quickly end up with tons of useless tabs so I just end up closing them all and starting over. I have to spend time focused on tab management if I want tabs to be useful at all.
Firefox will direct me to a tab if I try to reopen it from the address bar or bookmark and I really appreciate that.
I don’t know if this will solve all of my Obsidian tabbing woes but I think it will help!
When I click a link in a pinned note (without holding Ctrl to open it in a new tab), while the pin note doesn’t change, the note gets loaded into the rightmost tab open, changing it to what I clicked. A browser would open the link in its own new tab entirely, rather than have this behavior which costs me a few more seconds to fix. Could this be changed so clicking links on pinned notes always defaults to opening in its own tab?
Let me share my perspective on how Vim models this whole business of views on content.
In Vim/Neovim, a tab is basically an organization space for splits (a.k.a windows, panes, etc. And splits are views into a buffer. Tabs in Vim are much more like Obsidian workspaces. Tabs offer mutually exclusive frames filled with one or more splits/views onto data. You do not get to see tabs side-by-side. If you want to see things side-by-side, you use splits (within a tab).
I’ve been using Vim for so long now that it’s become integrated into both my “muscle memory” as well as “gaze memory” (i.e., where I look to focus my attention after carrying out an action). I can use Obsidian workspaces as Vim tabs and Obsidian tabs as Vim splits. But I always get thrown off when Obsidian opens a new tab within what I woulld call a “split” and changes focus to it, essentially just replacing one panel in my view rather than giving me a clean single-panel “fresh start” view onto whatever I opened. What my “gaze memory” really expects to happen when my mind thinks “new tab” is essentially an Obsidian “new workspace”
Using the browser analogy to justify the current workflow doesn’t stand up. Browser tabs represent a response to a request at a specific point in time. A browser tab doesn’t automatically “stay in sync” to reflect changes on the web server. So there is a compelling use case for multiple open tabs for the same URL.
What Obsidian has is an excellent start to a tab-based workflow for information management – the next evolutionary step after the original pane-based workflow. But given that these days, Obsidian tabs are primarily live views of user-editable content (as opposed to the memorialization of a historical, static web request/response), a true, 100% complete implementation does necessitate this feature/option, as well as native support for tab switching in MRU (most recently used) order.
+100