Beautitab → Tab Candy Rebrand & Refactor

[lvnacy]

Beautitab → Tab Candy Rebrand & Refactor

Summary

This PR is a ground-up rebuild of Tab Candy (forked from the abandoned Beautitab) into a modern, mobile-safe, tested Obsidian plugin. Every layer of the project — toolchain, data model, runtime APIs, UI architecture, file layout, and CI — was rebuilt from first principles rather than patched incrementally. Nothing user-facing about the plugin's purpose changed; nearly everything about how it's built and maintained did.

What changed

Toolchain & branding — Migrated to pnpm, a modern ESLint flat config, and a unified ES2020 build target. Rebranded as a genuinely new plugin (tabcandy, not an upgrade path from Beautitab) with consistent naming throughout.

Settings & data — Settings are now versioned and validated at load time, so malformed or legacy data can't corrupt state. A typed SettingsStore replaced an untyped, actually-broken pub/sub implementation.

Mobile support — This was the core motivator. All fs/path/Electron-dependent features (background sync, image loading) were rebuilt on vault-relative APIs, making the plugin fully functional on mobile for the first time. Manually verified working on-device.

Obsidian API compliance — Migrated to ItemView, replaced blanket "hijack every new tab" behavior with an explicit command plus an opt-in convenience toggle, and isolated all private/internal API access (bookmarks, commands, internal plugins) behind guarded adapters that fail closed instead of throwing.

UI architecture — The React layer was restructured into hooks and presentational components with a real separation of concerns, and the whole source tree was consolidated from a scattered set of folders into a single coherent src/.

Type safety — A dedicated hardening pass eliminated remaining any/unknown usage and consolidated all types into one source of truth.

Testing & CI — Added a Vitest suite (~200+ tests) covering settings normalization, backgrounds, bookmarks, commands, and view lifecycle, with a coverage ratchet that prevents regression. PR-gated CI and a release workflow were built from scratch.

Feature changes — Two long-broken integrations (Unsplash-based seasonal backgrounds, the Quotable quotes API) were removed outright rather than left silently non-functional, since neither had a working, maintainable replacement.

Bugs fixed along the way

Several real, pre-existing bugs surfaced during the rebuild: a broken Observable unsubscribe, mistyped settings callbacks, a bookmarks-render crash on folder bookmarks, a stale Sass import silently blocking every production build, and a tab-focus bug where hijacked tabs misdirected file navigation.

Verification

typecheck, lint, test, and build are all clean. Manual mobile verification is complete. Remaining pre-publish items (community plugin listing requirements, final README polish) are tracked separately and are not blockers for this PR.

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This discussion was created from the release Beautitab → Tab Candy Rebrand & Refactor.