In this post, we will explore the

Environment Key

and

EnvironmentValues

to achieve the programmatic tab switching in

TabView

.Lets start with the empty SwiftUI template from the Xcode and Create new SwiftUI view named AppTabView.swift.

Define AppTabView

Here we define our tabs in AppTabView like below.

struct AppTabView: View {
    enum Tab {
        case profile
        case bookmarks
        case settings
    }
    
    @State private var selectedTab: Tab = .profile
    
    var body: some View {
        TabView(selection: $selectedTab) {
            ProfileView()
                .tabItem {
                    Image(systemName: "person")
                    Text("Profile")
                }
                .tag(Tab.profile)
             
            BookmarksView()
                .tabItem {
                    Image(systemName: "book")
                    Text("Bookmarks")
                }
                .tag(Tab.bookmarks)
                 
            SettingsView()
                .tabItem {
                    Image(systemName: "gear")
                    Text("Settings")
                }
                .tag(Tab.settings)
        }
    }
}

Here you can see we have used the

.tag

modifier in order to TabView to switch the current tab.

If we use @SceneStorage("selectedTab") instead of @State, then we can get some level of state-restoration behaviour.

Now below is the contents of the

ProfileView

BookmarksView

and

SettingsView

struct ProfileView: View {
    
    var body: some View {
        NavigationView {
            List {
                Button("Bookmarks") {
                    print("Switch to Bookmarks Tab")
                }
                Button("Settings") {
                    print("Switch to Settings Tab")
                }
            }
            .listStyle(InsetGroupedListStyle())
            .navigationTitle("Profile")
            .navigationBarTitleDisplayMode(.inline)
        }
    }
}

struct BookmarksView: View {

    var body: some View {
        NavigationView {
            List {
                NavigationLink(destination: BookmarkDetailView()) {
                    Text("ICE")
                }
                Button("Settings") {
                    print("Switch to Settings Tab")
                }
            }
            .listStyle(InsetGroupedListStyle())
            .navigationTitle("Bookmarks")
            .navigationBarTitleDisplayMode(.inline)
        }
    }
}

struct SettingsView: View {
    
    var body: some View {
        NavigationView {
            List {
                Button("Profile") {
                    print("Switch to Profile View")
                }
                Button("Bookmarks") {
                    print("Switch to Bookmarsk View")
                }
            }
            .listStyle(InsetGroupedListStyle())
            .navigationTitle("Settings")
            .navigationBarTitleDisplayMode(.inline)
        }
    }
}

Now we have the our basic tabs setup, now we need some way to pass the button press action to super view (

AppTabView

in our case ). So we can use the

EnvironmentKey

and

EnvironmentValues

here.So let's start defining our EnviromentKey named

CurrentTabKey

like below.

struct CurrentTabKey: EnvironmentKey {
    static var defaultValue: AppTabView.Tab = .bookmarks
}

To use above

EnvironmentKey

we need to extend the

EnvironmentValues

like below.

extension EnvironmentValues {
    var currentTab: AppTabView.Tab {
        get { self[CurrentTabKey.self] }
        set { self[CurrentTabKey.self] = newValue }
    }
}

Now we can use this

CurrentTabKey

like below.

    ...
    TabView(selection: $selectedTab) {
            ProfileView()
                .tabItem {
                    Image(systemName: "person")
                    Text("Profile")
                }
                .tag(Tab.profile)
                .environment(\.currentTab, selectedTab)
    ...

And in the

ProfileView

we can use the environment property wrapper like below.

struct ProfileView: View {
    @Environment(\.currentTab) var tab
    
    var body: some View {
        NavigationView {
            List {
                Button("Bookmarks") {
                    tab = .bookmarks
                }
                Button("Settings") {
                    tab = .settings
                }
            }
            .listStyle(InsetGroupedListStyle())
            .navigationTitle("Profile")
            .navigationBarTitleDisplayMode(.inline)
        }
    }
}

Here we can use the environment variable in our button action. But...

Cannot assign to property: 'tab' is a get-only property

To solve this, we need to recall the two way data communication in SwiftUI. For this SwiftUI has property wrapper called

Binding

Set CurrentTabKey

So we update our EnvironmentKey struct CurrentTabKey like below.

struct CurrentTabKey: EnvironmentKey {
    static var defaultValue: Binding<AppTabView.Tab> = .constant(.bookmarks)
}

And EnvironmentValues like below.

extension EnvironmentValues {
    var currentTab: Binding<AppTabView.Tab> {
        get { self[CurrentTabKey.self] }
        set { self[CurrentTabKey.self] = newValue }
    }
}

Cannot convert value 'selectedTab' of type 'AppTabView.Tab' to expected type 'Binding<AppTabView.Tab>', use wrapper instead
Insert $

Fixing the above compiler error by putting the

in the environment modifier like below.

...
            ProfileView()
                .tabItem {
                    Image(systemName: "person")
                    Text("Profile")
                }
                .tag(Tab.profile)
                .environment(\.currentTab, $selectedTab)

...

And now finaly updating our Views like below.

...
                Button("Bookmarks") {
                    tab.wrappedValue = .bookmarks
                }
                Button("Settings") {
                    tab.wrappedValue = .settings
                }
...

Set BookmarkDetailView

struct BookmarkDetailView: View {
    @Environment(\.currentTab) var tab
    var body: some View {
        List {
            Button("Profile") {
                tab.wrappedValue = .profile
            }
        }
        .listStyle(InsetGroupedListStyle())
        .navigationTitle("Bookmark Detail")
        .navigationBarTitleDisplayMode(.inline)
    }
}

And here we have it.We hope you liked it. Thanks for reading.

Using SwiftUI Environments Values to change Tabs programmatically. in 2026

Define AppTabView

Set CurrentTabKey

Set BookmarkDetailView

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