---
title: "The sidebar"
description: "Tabs grouped by repository, with branch, diff counts, and agent status on every row."
---

The left sidebar is tty7's tab bar, and it is the default because a vertical row
has room for things a horizontal chip does not: the repository a tab belongs to,
the branch it is on, how much has changed there, and what a coding agent in it
is doing.

<kbd>⌘ B</kbd> shows and hides it. Drag its right edge to resize.

<Frame caption="Placeholder — screenshot: the sidebar with two repo groups, agent avatars and status dots, branch and +N −M counts">
  <img src="/images/placeholder.svg" alt="The tty7 tab sidebar" />
</Frame>

## Grouped by repository

Rows sit under a header per git repository, with everything else collected in a
trailing **Scratch** section. The grouping follows the tab's working directory,
not its history — switching branches or `cd`-ing around inside a repository
never moves a row out from under its header.

**Settings → Window & Tabs → Sidebar grouping** switches between *By repo* (the
default), *By repo or folder*, and *Flat*. The default collects every non-repo
tab in Scratch; *By repo or folder* groups those tabs under their working
directory instead — for agents running in plain folders — leaving Scratch to
tabs whose shell has not reported a directory yet.

## What a row tells you

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Who is running there" icon="robot">
    A brand avatar when a coding agent is in the tab, plus a status dot —
    blue for working, amber for needs-your-input, green for done.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Where it is" icon="code-branch">
    The pane's git branch, refreshed on `cd` and whenever a command finishes.
  </Card>
  <Card title="What changed" icon="plus-minus">
    The working-tree diff as `+N −M`. Click the counts to open the
    [diff overlay](/git/diffs).
  </Card>
  <Card title="Whether you have looked" icon="circle-dot">
    An unread marker on tabs where a coding agent finished its turn while you
    were elsewhere. Agent tabs also carry *Mark as Unread* in the right-click
    menu, once there is a finished turn to mark.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

If you would rather the counts not be clickable, turn off **Settings → Window &
Tabs → Open diff preview from sidebar counts**. The branch and the numbers stay;
they simply stop opening the overlay.

## Rearranging

Drag a row to reorder it within its group, or drag a whole group header to move
the group. A row cannot be dragged into a different group: a tab's group comes
from its working directory, so `cd` is what moves it.

Drag a row out over the panes instead and it stops being a session of its own:
it lands as a pane of the tab on screen, wherever the highlight says. Dragging a
pane the other way — by its grip, onto the sidebar — gives it a row of its own,
between whichever two the caret lands between. See
[making one tab a pane of another](/window/tabs-and-splits#making-one-tab-a-pane-of-another).

## Naming

Almost no tab has a name of its own, so the sidebar falls back:

1. a name you set (right-click → **Rename Tab…**)
2. the title the shell is reporting — the running command, usually
3. **Shell 3**, numbered by position, when there is no title at all

`tty7 tab ls` answers the same question with more evidence, because a script has
no screen to look at. Its `label` falls back through the name, then the coding
agent running in the tab ("Claude Code"), then the last segment of the working
directory, then the foreground process — while `name` stays literal, so a script
can tell a real name from a stand-in.

## The switcher

<kbd>⌘ ⇧ O</kbd> opens the workspace switcher: every workspace on every machine
you are connected to on the left, that workspace's tabs on the right. Type to
filter both, <kbd>⇥</kbd> to cross into the tab column, <kbd>⏎</kbd> to open.

From here you can also rename a workspace, open one in a new window, stop one,
or connect to a machine you have a profile for.