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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. ⌘ B shows and hides it. Drag its right edge to resize.
The tty7 tab sidebar

Tabs grouped by repository, with agent avatars, status dots, branch, and +N −M

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Groups

The sidebar groups tabs by repository automatically. Pin what you want to keep. Auto groups sit below the pinned ones. Every tab you have not pinned is filed under the git repository its working directory is in — a linked worktree under the repository it belongs to, a submodule under itself — and an SSH tab under the host it is connected to, so /home/ubuntu on two machines is two groups. Everything else collects in a trailing Ungrouped section. An auto group follows the tab’s working directory, not its history: cd into another repository and the row moves; switching branches never does. When its last tab leaves, the group is gone. Pinned groups sit at the top, each marked ◆ beside its name, in the order you put them, and stay until you delete them — an empty one keeps its place with a + New Tab row. A tab in a pinned group never leaves it on its own. There are two kinds:
  • A folder group keeps a directory. A tab whose working directory enters the folder joins it — a tab opened there, a cd into it, or a worktree of the repository the folder is. When folders nest, the deepest one wins, so pinning a monorepo and one package in it files the package’s tabs under the package. A tab you drag out while it is still inside stays out until it leaves the folder and comes back. Hover the header for the folder’s path; click its ◆ to unpin it, and its tabs go back to auto groups.
  • A label group is just a name, for tabs that belong together for a reason no directory shows. Tabs go in and out of it by hand.
Ways to pin: Right-click a pinned group’s header to rename it, point it at a folder (Set Folder…, or Use Current Tab’s Folder), clear its folder, open a tab in it, or delete it. Deleting a group closes nothing: its tabs go back to auto grouping. An auto group has no rename — pin it first. The + on a header opens a tab in that group’s folder (a label group’s opens where ⌘ T would), and ⌘ T itself joins the group of the tab you are in. Groups, their order, and which ones are folded are kept with the workspace, so every window onto it — and the next launch — shows the same thing. Settings → General → Auto grouping turns auto groups off. The tabs you have not pinned then sit in one flat list below your pinned groups, which show either way.

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What a row tells you

Who is running there

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.

Where it is

The pane’s git branch, refreshed on cd and whenever a command finishes.

What changed

The working-tree diff as +N −M. Click the counts to open the diff overlay.

Whether you have looked

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.

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Rearranging

Drag a row to reorder it within its group, or drag a group header to move the group — pinned groups among pinned groups, auto groups among auto groups. Drag a row onto a pinned group to put it there, or anywhere below the pinned groups to hand it back to auto grouping. A row cannot be dragged into an auto group: its membership comes from the 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.

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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.

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The switcher

⌘ ⇧ O 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, ⇥ to cross into the tab column, ⏎ 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.