Enhanced Tab Settings

This plugin adds settings to customize how Obsidian opens tabs and navigates between files, including options to:

• open in new tab by default
• switch to existing tab instead of opening a duplicate file
• customize new tab placement and order
• open new tabs in the opposite pane when using a split workspace
• preview files in a temporary tab (single click), promote to permanent on double-click or edit

Using these settings can enable a more familiar workflow for those used to working in editors like VSCode. With the "Always open in new tab" toggled, Obsidian will always open files in a new tab, whether they were opened via links, the quick switcher, file explorer, etc. Never accidentally lose your tabs again!

Features

The primary settings can also be toggled via commands.

Preview Tabs

Enable the Preview tabs setting to get VSCode-style preview behavior in the file explorer:

• Single click a file in the file explorer to preview it in a temporary tab. The tab header is displayed in italic style to indicate it's a preview.
• Double click a file to promote the preview tab to a permanent one.
• Auto-promote on edit (enabled by default): when you start editing a file in a preview tab, it is automatically promoted to a permanent tab.
• If the file is already open in a permanent tab, normal deduplication applies instead — it won't open a second copy in the preview tab.
• Disabling the preview tabs setting promotes any existing preview tab to permanent.

Comparison with similar plugins

There are several plugins that attempt to solve this problem with different pros and cons. However, most other options either only work in specific menus or have a noticeable timer delay before opening new tabs. "Open Tab Settings" works by patching some of Obsidian's internal methods to achieve consistent and seamless new tab and de-duplication behavior throughout Obsidian. It is inspired by the Opener plugin which worked in a similar way, but is no longer maintained and broken on the latest Obsidian (though it has since been forked). "Open Tab Settings" also adds a few improvements over Opener, including making non-file views such as the Graph View also open in new tabs and adding several customization options for new tab placement.

Plugin compatibility

Open Tab Settings should be compatible with most other plugins, if you encounter any plugin incompatibility problems please submit an issue.

Some known plugin interactions:

• The PDF++ plugin customizes the opening behavior of PDFs which can override Open Tab Setting's behavior. You can make the plugins play nicely together by setting the "How to open..." options to "new tab" in the PDF++ settings.

Contributing

You can build the plugin with:

npm install
npm run build

This plugin has end-to-end tests using wdio-obsidian-service and WebdriverIO. Run them with:

npm run test

This will automatically download the latest Obsidian version and test the plugin against it.