Everything you have open lives in a strip of small tabs at the top of the workspace. You move between them from the strip's hover list, by keyboard, or by swiping.
The strip
Home is always the first tab and can't be closed - it's your fixed starting point (see home). After it come your open tabs, one per open item, each holding its place in the strip - the strip holds up to six tabs besides Home. Notes and tag pages sit side by side here: a tag page is a tab like any other.
Each tab is a small marker - a dot for a note, a pentagon for a tag, the star for Home, a dashed ring for a fresh empty tab. Click a marker to switch straight to that tab. Hover the strip and a popover opens. Home sits at the top - click it to go Home - and below it every open tab is listed by name. Click a row to jump to it, or hover the row to reveal its close control. At the foot sits a New Tab row with its ⌘T hint.
The strip and its popover work as one surface: the popover stays open while the pointer is over either of them, so you can click through markers and watch the active row follow, and it closes once you move away from both.
Reordering
Drag a row in the popover up or down to move that tab. The strip follows the new order, and so do ⌘2-⌘7. Home always stays first.
Tabs work like a browser
Open a note or a tag - from search, a link, anywhere - and it fills the tab you're on, which keeps its place in the strip. If the item is already open somewhere, you simply switch to its tab - never a duplicate. Opening something while you're on Home starts a new tab instead: Home is never replaced.
Tabs don't expire - every tab stays until you close it. The one exception: opening something while you're on Home adds a tab rather than filling one - a search result, a new note with ⌘N, a dropped file - and if the strip already holds six tabs, the leftmost one after Home drops off. That's by position, not age, so a tab you've just dragged up next to Home is the first to go. It isn't lost, just closed: still in your library, a search away.
Close the active tab and you land on the last tab in the strip; close everything and you land on Home.
Empty tabs
Sometimes you want a clean slate without giving up what's open. ⌘T, File ▸ New Tab, or the New Tab row at the foot of the strip's popover opens a fresh empty tab - a dashed ring in the strip, listed in italics as Empty Tab in the popover. The editor greets you with "A fresh tab." and a short looping animation. Each scene shows one thing Nodes can do - linking, the graph, tags, search - with its tip under the title; click the tip to skip ahead. Below sit New Note and Open node buttons. Whatever you create or open from there fills the empty tab in place, so no blank tab is left behind. Pick something that's already open in another tab, though, and you simply switch to it - the empty tab stays where it is.
New Tab never closes a tab to make room. Once six tabs are open, the New Tab row dims and reads 6 tabs max, and ⌘T and File ▸ New Tab grey out until you close one.
Keyboard and swipe
- ⌘1 jumps to Home.
- ⌘2-⌘7 jump to the tab at that position in the strip - Home is position 1, so ⌘2 is the next tab along. They also live under View ▸ Open Tab.
- ⌘T opens a new empty tab; ⌘N starts a new note in the tab you're on (from Home, in a new tab).
- ⌘W (File ▸ Close Tab) closes the tab you're on. Home can't be closed, so on Home it does nothing.
- A horizontal swipe flips to the next or previous open item.
You can change any of these in Settings ▸ Shortcuts, where ⌘2-⌘7 are one row, Tab 2 to 7: you choose the modifier and the digit stays the tab's position. For the full list, see shortcuts.