changing location.hash with jquery ui tabs

In your event handler function ui.tab is an anchor element. You can retrieve its hash value like this:

$("#tabs > ul").tabs();
$("#tabs > ul").bind("tabsshow", function(event, ui) { 
    window.location.hash = ui.tab.hash;
})

Does this work for you?

$('#tabs').tabs({
    select: function(event, ui) {
        window.location.hash = ui.tab.hash;
    }
});

While some of the above solutions work, they cause the page to jump around in some cases, as the window.location.hash API is designed to bring you to a specific part of the page.

This neat solution proposed here, solves that issue

  $("#tabs").bind("tabsshow", function(event, ui) { 
    history.pushState(null, null, ui.tab.hash);
  });

This worked for me, jQuery UI 1.10:

$('#elexumaps_events_tabs').tabs({
    activate: function(event, ui) { 
       window.location.hash=ui.newPanel.selector; 
    }
});

See also: http://api.jqueryui.com/tabs/#event-activate