Something that has annoyed me ever since I found the built-in tabs macro, is that if you don’t supply a default tab, then the default display is that no tab is selected. IMHO, that is plain ugly and also inconsistent, since once you have selected a tab there is no way to go back to nothing selected …

I share your point of view. I’m using the following workarounds for my purposes: if the tab list is dynamic, I set a filter-based variable that hold the tab tiddlers; the tabs macro uses the first element from this list as the default tab an empty tab tiddler with caption “×” is added to the end o…

[image] andrewg_oz: if you don’t supply a default tab, then the default display is that no tab is selected. [image] vilc: But maybe some easy way to optionally use first tab as default or to have some way to close all tabs would be worth implementing? I’ve thought about this problem to…

If the default tab setting was a filter then it would continue to accept a named tiddler Or ‘[tag[tagname]first[]]’ I think wherever we permit a title as the value of a parameter we could enhance it by permitting a filter However given tw 5.3.x you can do this as follows; Default=`${ [tag[tagname…

Ah, I realize my point of frustration is not with basic tabs macro, but with toc-tabbed macros, which do not seem to have any default parameter at all! (I didn’t realize this until I tried the solution by @TW_Tones — in my toc-tabbed solutions — and then went looking for the Default parameter docum…

[image] vilc: [image] andrewg_oz: Is there a reason for defaulting to no tabs? Why not default to the first title? No tabs has been the default behavior, changing it now would break backwards compatibility. It would be different, but I think it would be backwards compatible. I think “n…

I would add too, that the tabs filter or a custom operator can return a list of titles as follows; introTab [tag[tabtag]] where introtab could be defaulted and contain a message such as select one of the above tabs to see its contents. in many cases this could also contain sophisticated info abo…

It seems for backwards compatibility, the existing tabs macro is unlikely to be changed. So, after a bit of playing around, I’ve come up with a new macro: \procedure tabs-defaultfirst(tabsList,default,state,class,template,buttonTemplate,retain,actions,explicitState) <$transclude $variable=tabs t…

[image] andrewg_oz: It seems for backwards compatibility, the existing tabs macro is unlikely to be changed. I’m not sure why this would be so, and @pmario ’s comments also seem open to an improvement. No prior expectations would be broken by adding, for example, an additional available param…

[image] Springer: I’m not sure why this would be so, and @pmario ’s comments also seem open to an improvement. Thanks. The problem I had was that my original attempts at modifying the tabs macro all failed when dealing with tiddlers with spaces in their title. However, you’ve encouraged me to …

[image] andrewg_oz: If you have none of this defaultFilter stuff, then it works just like now. I did a test with this code. No extra options. first[] is hardcoded. It makes the code much simpler. IMO a new parameter increases complexity quite a bit. This solution still has the problem, that …

Tabs macro default tab

andrewg_oz February 24, 2026, 2:54pm 13

Just in case anyone comes across this old thread, it’s been effectively solved here: