Note tabs is a feature present in some major competitor apps such as Obsidian and Notesnook. While there is a Note tabs plugin available which works on both desktop and mobile, the mobile experience for the plugin is very poor.
While Obsidian seems to implement actual tabs on mobile which retain the full note state when switching, Notesnook appears to implement tabs more like a navigation shortcut with an independent navigation history. Implementing something like Notesnook would likely be easier and would have a low enough memory footprint to be persisted after app restarts (maybe clearing the history per tab, but remembering the selected note per tab)
The Note tabs plugin is not a good experience but is workable - and stops working every once and a while (for no reason I can figure out or report as a bug) so I have to force stop Joplin to get it working again. Also the note tab plugin really isn't switching tabs - it seems to stack them up so you have to keep backing out of tabs to keep things making sense.
I use 4 notes very often on mobile and having a good way to switch between them would be a fantastic addition for my use. I am looking for nothing more complicated than shortcuts to move to another tab - I personally don't need any fancy stacking or state storage - just the ability to quickly switch to one of my "favorite" tabs.
FYI if the notes you need to switch to are fixed, a good workaround would be to create a tag called Favourites, then if you tag those 4 notes, if you open the note from the tag entry, you can navigate back once to easily go between those notes. But for a dynamic set of notes, note tabs are the ideal way to manage that.
agreed, this would be nice on desktop too! I currently use the note tabs plugin but the way its ux works is a little anachronistic compared to modern tabs implementations in apps like obsidian (e.g. it acts more like a standalone "pinning" function vs the browser-like tabs most users would expect)
At least on desktop, I wonder if the fact that we support multiple windows means we can also support multiple tabs using the same mechanism. It could be worth checking it out.
On mobile, can the CodeMirror state be serialized somehow? In which case we could save it when switching tabs and restoring it afterwards. There's also how to handle this in terms of UI but for that we can probably just check what other apps do