This is planned: #2255

This is not a trivial change. As usual, Pull Requestsare most gratefully appreciated.

Not exactly persisting the same instance, but I reached an acceptable workaround for me with:

require('nvim-tree').setup({
	tab = {
		sync = {
			open  = true,
			close = true,
		},
	},
})

Which persists the tree size/state across tabs

The main caveat is that resizing the tree doesn't automatically apply to other tabs

But if you resize with :NvimTreeResize, then open/close, they all reset to the same common size

Closest I'm going to get I think