Rearranging Tab Bar Controller Order in StoryBoard

In 4.5 save the storyboard after adding a Controller, switch to another file and then back to the Storyboard and the tab dragging should work again.

You can just re-arrange the order by dragging and dropping the icons in the tab bar controller

SHIFT + DRAG works on Xcode 10.0

I was not able to drag&drop with XCode 4.6 (with any of mentioned cobination). I have solved it opening the storybord in "Source Code" mode, locating the tabBarController and rearranging the seque tag.

I know the OP is using Xcode interface builder and asking for a graphical way to do this, but for developers working with Xamarin iOS Designer, here is a workaround that I use.

Open the .storyboard file in a text editor or using Xcode, right click on the storyboard item in Project Navigator and select Open As Source Code. In the storyboard XML locate the <tabBarController ...> node. Then I rearrange the order of the segues in the <connections> section:

<connections>
    <segue destination="274" kind="relationship" relationship="viewControllers" id="286"/>
    <segue id="943" destination="910" kind="relationship" relationship="viewControllers"/>
    <segue destination="147" kind="relationship" relationship="viewControllers" id="159"/>
</connections>

Search for the destination= attribute value in the XML to determine which view controller the segue element is pointing at.

XCODE 10.1: Zoom the story board. Simply drag tab items. (No shift no other)

Just drag and drop the tab icons in the tab bar.

i.e. the main tab bar that belongs to the tab bar controller.

HTH

::EDIT:: So this doesn't seem to work... I'm sure it used to.

Anyway, the easiest way I found is to remove the tabs and add them back in the order you want them to show.

Hope this helps.

As noted in comments, drag & drop doesn't currently work (Xcode 4.5) after adding a navigation controller. However, restarting Xcode after adding the controller seems to get drag & drop working again.

If you open the storyboard as 'source code view' and then close it an open it as IB view it seems to fix the bug..

To add on to the drag and drop method provided by everyone. I posted this as an answer so that I can include images. Tried on Xcode 7.3

If you are using custom tab bar item, you can still drag and drop to reorder even though the Tab Bar Controller scene shows a grey bar, the bar item is still there. This is especially inconspicuous when all your bar item are custom items

https://i.stack.imgur.com/odw8g.png

I'm using XCode 5.1 for development of iOS 7.1 and I found the following approach works for rearranging the tabs in a Tab Bar Controller.

To rearrange the tabs in a Tab Bar Controller, delete the segues from the Tab Bar Controller to your sub-view controllers. Then re-draw the segues in the order you want the tabs. To "re-draw" I mean you control drag from the Tab Bar Controller to the sub-view controller and select Relationship Segue (at bottom of list) => view controllers.

You can just drag tab bar item and drop it in the place that you want, like the beneath picture

https://i.stack.imgur.com/wgchL.png

You can make sure that the Tab Controller Dock option in your Main storyboard is set to "First Responder", that solved it for me!

I had the same issue after adding a Navigation Controller.

Fix: close the storyboard (Ctrl+Cmd+W) and do a clean build folder (Option+Cmd+Shift+K) and a regular clean (Cmd+Shift+K). Reopen the storyboard and you'll be able to drag the items again.

Same thing is in xCode 4.6. I originally was following tutorial on beginning storyboards in ios At the point to swith the item on TabBarController, I could't change the order. I tried to save it - didn't work; however, Once I closed the XCode and open again - it DID WORK.

Control + drag the item in TabBarController in storyboard and rearrange to the desired position.

I was following the raywenderlich tutorial for storyboards too and realised that after adding the tab controller i couldn't rearrange the tabs by dragging it. Well, apparently its just some bug in xcode. So just quit xcode, restart it and this time, you will be able to drag the tabs.

For me dragging did not work either in XCode 7.3.1. Restarting XCode did not help. And none of the above mentioned solutions worked for me.

What helped me: I deleted the relationship to the second item and ctrl-dragged from that item to the Tab Bar Controller and created another relationship. It was automatically in the second place now.

Remove all viewcontrollers sequge with tabbar. You need first viewcontroller first segue then another viewcontroller connect with tabbar.

No restart xcode & no clear source code file in change require.