Tabbi

⌘Tab for your Obsidian tabs. Hold, tap, release. You're there.

You know the gesture already. Hold the modifier, tap to cycle, let go to land. Tabbi brings it to Obsidian, ordered by what you actually used last — not by whatever arbitrary order your tabs happen to sit in.

No fuzzy search box. No typing. No reading. Just the muscle memory you've had since you learned to use a computer.

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Attention Is All You Need              │
│  …ctures/Transformers/Attention Is…md   │
│ ╭─────────────────────────────────────╮ │
│ │ daily-2026-09-30                    │ │
│ │ Journal/2026/09/daily-2026-09-30.md │ │
│ ╰─────────────────────────────────────╯ │
│  Inference Infra                        │
│  …Interview Prep/System Design/Infra.md │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘

The gesture

You do	You get
Tap and release	Bounce straight back to the last tab. The toggle you do a hundred times a day.
Hold and keep tapping	Walk down the list, one tab per tap, wrapping round at the end.
Let go	Lands on whatever's highlighted. Done.

The overlay opens already sitting on your previous tab — so the quick tap is a straight there-and-back, exactly like ⌘Tab between two apps. Keep holding and it becomes a list you can walk.

Mouse and arrows work too, if you want them: ↑/↓ to move, Enter to commit, Esc to bail, hover to preview, click to jump.

Hotkeys

	Default
Cycle forward	Ctrl+Q
Cycle backward	Ctrl+Shift+Q

Rebind them in Settings → Tabbi as a chord — Ctrl+Q, Alt+Tab, Mod+E (Mod is ⌘ on macOS, Ctrl elsewhere).

Every chord needs at least one modifier. That modifier is the thing you hold, so a bare key has nothing to release and Tabbi will reject it.

One gotcha. Tabbi sets these as the commands' default hotkeys. If you've ever customised the Tabbi commands under Settings → Hotkeys, that binding wins permanently and the plugin's own setting goes inert — Obsidian's API offers no way around it. Set your chord in Tabbi's settings, and clear any override in Obsidian's hotkey pane.

Don't bind Mod+Q on macOS. That quits Obsidian.

Reading the list

Each row is the note name, with its full vault-relative path underneath.

Long paths truncate from the left, never the right — the tail is the part that tells Projects/Q3/notes.md apart from Archive/2019/notes.md, so the tail is what survives. Tabs with no file behind them (graph, canvas) get a type tag instead.

Settings

• Switch on modifier release — on by default. Turn it off if something on your system eats keyup events; the overlay then waits for Enter or a click.
• Maximum entries — cap the list. 0 shows everything.
• Show full path — toggle the second line.
• Visible rows — 4–20 before it starts scrolling.

Install

Not in the community plugin directory yet. Two ways in the meantime.

Via BRAT (recommended)

BRAT installs plugins straight from GitHub and keeps them updated.

1. Install BRAT from Obsidian's community plugins and enable it.
2. Run BRAT: Add a beta plugin for testing from the command palette.
3. Paste pujunru/obsidian-tabbi and confirm.
4. Enable Tabbi under Settings → Community plugins.

Future releases arrive automatically.

Manually

Grab main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release, drop them into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/tabbi/, and enable Tabbi under Settings → Community plugins.

From source

git clone https://github.com/pujunru/obsidian-tabbi.git
cd obsidian-tabbi
npm install
npm run build

npm run dev rebuilds on save.

Notes

Desktop only — it rides on keyup events that Obsidian mobile doesn't deliver. Only tabs in the main editing area are tracked; sidebars stay out of it.

How it works

Obsidian keeps no most-recently-used order of its own, so Tabbi maintains one: every active-leaf change promotes that leaf to the front, and closed tabs are pruned lazily whenever the list is read.

The overlay is a plain DOM element on document.body rather than a Modal, which keeps Obsidian's focus handling from stealing keys mid-cycle. A capture-phase keyup listener on the document watches the master modifier — parsed out of your chord, skipping Shift since that's usually the reverse-direction qualifier — and commits the moment it lifts. A window blur commits too, since a modifier release that happens after the OS takes the keyboard away is a release that never arrives.

License

MIT