Obsidian Vertical Tabs: Active Tab Stretching Issue
It seems like a peculiar, yet potentially disruptive, issue has cropped up with the Obsidian Vertical Tabs plugin. You've reported that instead of tabs dividing the available space equally, the active tab is now bloatting up and taking over the entire width. This is definitely not the intended behavior, and as you rightly pointed out, it can make navigating between tabs a real hassle when the layout shifts so dramatically with each click. Let's dive into this bug and see if we can shed some light on what might be happening and how to approach it.
Understanding the Vertical Tabs Plugin and its Features
The Obsidian Vertical Tabs plugin aims to bring a more traditional tabbed interface to Obsidian, allowing you to manage multiple notes within a single pane. This can be incredibly useful for workflow efficiency, letting you quickly switch between different documents without cluttering your workspace with numerous separate panes. One of the key features you seem to be utilizing is the scrollable tabs functionality, which is designed to handle a large number of open tabs without them becoming unmanageably wide. The intention here is that when tabs exceed the available space, they become scrollable, rather than forcing a redesign of the entire tab bar. This typically means that tabs maintain a more consistent width, and a scrollbar appears when needed. However, in your case, this expected behavior is being overridden, with the active tab becoming disproportionately large, consuming all available horizontal space. This fundamentally changes the user experience, moving away from predictable tab sizing and making it harder to discern and click on adjacent tabs, especially when the active tab's width fluctuates wildly. The fact that this issue appeared suddenly, without any apparent changes to your setup beyond standard updates, suggests a potential regression or an unexpected interaction with a recent plugin or Obsidian update. It's good that you've followed the bug report checklist meticulously, disabling other plugins and themes, which helps isolate the problem to Vertical Tabs itself. Your detailed description of the problem, including the specific settings related to scrollable tabs (which are enabled with a minimum width of 100px), provides crucial information for developers to start investigating. The screenshots you've provided are also invaluable, clearly illustrating the drastic difference in tab width when a tab is active versus inactive.
Diagnosing the "Active Tab Bloat" Bug
The core of this bug report revolves around the scrollableTabs setting within the Obsidian Vertical Tabs plugin. When scrollableTabs is enabled, the expectation is that if the total width of all tabs exceeds the width of the tab bar container, a horizontal scrollbar should appear, and individual tabs should ideally maintain a somewhat uniform width, perhaps shrinking slightly to fit or staying at a defined minimum. Your report, however, states that instead of this uniform scaling or scrolling behavior, the active tab is stretching to fill all available horizontal space, pushing other tabs out of view or shrinking them to near invisibility. This suggests that the logic responsible for distributing space among tabs is malfunctioning specifically when a tab is marked as active, and perhaps when the scrollableTabs feature is engaged.
Let's look at the provided settings: "scrollableTabs": true and "scrollableTabsMinWidth": 100. This configuration indicates you want tabs to be scrollable if they become narrower than 100 pixels. The bug you're encountering seems to be overriding this and "enableTabZoom": true in a way that prioritizes maximizing the active tab's width above all else. It's possible that there's a conflict or an unintended consequence between these settings, or perhaps a change in how Obsidian's core layout engine interacts with the plugin's CSS or JavaScript after recent updates. The fact that this happened suddenly points to a potential regression. It could be that a recent update to Obsidian itself, or to the Vertical Tabs plugin (v0.16.6), introduced a change in how element widths are calculated or applied, leading to this unexpected stretching behavior. The plugin's description mentions that it's gorgeous, and it truly is a fantastic addition to Obsidian's UX, so fixing this kind of visual bug would be highly beneficial for maintaining that seamless experience. The description of the problem,
