Tabs tabs, where are you tabs?

I practically ran to my desk to install the beta. Tabs are something I (and others) have been asking for at every opportunity, and we’ve been shut down pretty without discussion every time. What I wrote in another thread is below.

I saw the mention of tabs in Lettera, but it doesn’t seem to be implemented in an intuitive way here, or maybe I’m misunderstanding it. It doesn’t work like every other product where you have multiple tabs across the top and you can click through to whichever note you need to edit.

Here is what I replied to on a post a few years back when someone kindly asked for tabs and was shut down pretty harshly:

That’s genuinely disappointing to hear, and I think it’s worth pushing back a little.

Real working tabs would make a meaningful difference for a lot of users, myself included. It’s part of why I keep one foot in Obsidian, Craft, Notion, and other apps that support them. Even Apple is considering adding tabs to Notes.

Most workflows aren’t linear. You’re often bouncing between several documents at once, copying content across files, juggling notes from multiple projects on a single call. The demand for tabs isn’t arbitrary.

I’ve spent a few decades in software engineering and shipped award-winning products. The most humbling lesson came from polling users and realizing we’d been building what we assumed people wanted. When we actually asked, the answer was: “Sure, that sounds nice, but what would REALLY make my life better is…”

Most other editors have figured out tabs. It’s not an impossible task unless you’ve painted yourself into a corner with single-file write access. What’s also frustrating here isn’t just the lack of tabs. It’s that a regularly requested feature gets shut down fast, with no explanation beyond “it’s too hard”.

That’s what loses people.

1 Like

If you go to “View” there is an option to “Show Tab Bar” that seems to be what you’re trying to accomplish.

This is the answer. We use macOS’s default tab/window behavior. Depending on your system, you’ll see tab bars everywhere, or nowhere by default unless you enable “Show Tab Bar”.

You can also make tabs appear from the context menu on files in the sidebar :light_bulb:

Ok, that is awesome!!!

Why can’t we do that in Bear?

This is the only missing feature in Bear… is opening documents in tab coming to bear too?