Tab Behavior and Vocabulary

Help
1

What I’m trying to do

I have two different vaults. They manage tabs differently. I want to make one of them act like the other.

With my “happy” vault, when I click on a file in the left pane, it open in THE right pane. I can navigate among recent tabs by using the “Navigate back” and “Navigate forward” arrows. There is only ever one file visible at a time.

With my “unhappy vault”, clicking on a file in the left pane opens an ADDITIONAL right pane. I get more and more (narrow) tabs in the right pane, as I open more files.

Things I have tried

  • I poked around in the Obsidian Settings.
  • I browsed the Obsidian command palette.
  • I searched “tabs” in the Obsidian forum.
  • I search “obsidian tabs” in Google.

I suspect the answer I want is out there, but I don’t know what it is named, so I can’t find it.
TIA

2

Found it. (Still don’t know the correct vocabulary.)

When using the “Default” theme, opening a file opens a new tab, and Obsidian slices up the tab(s) panel, showing narrow tab content, instead of filling the panel with 1 tab at a time.

When using the “Things” theme, opening a file opens the content replacing THE existing visible tab. One tab is displayed at a time, and you navigate among them with the left/right arrow icons.

Now if only someone could come up with a theme that puts the tab-tabs across the top, and displays the content from a single, active tab, filling the tab area – like web browsers do.

3

If you open up a blank sandbox vault, what is the behaviour there?

The “Things” theme sounds like default behavior, but themes do not have the ability to change behavior themselves.

ctrl + left click is the way to normally open a file in a new tab.

4

Thanks. I created a new vault (cleverly named “delete-me”). It does NOT open every file in a new tab. i.e. It has the desired behavior.

I switched my happy and unhappy vaults back to the Default theme, and they continue to behave properly. So it appears that simply changing the theme on the unhappy vault cured the behavior. (Probably that’s not really what happened, but that’s how it appears.)

I did see that ctrl-click opens in a new tab. My goals were to NOT open in a new tab – and for both of my vaults to behave the same in this regard.

I think we’ll have to chalk this up to “one of those things” which make me wonder whether life without computers would be better than life with computers. :wink: