The Claude Code sidebar

What the sidebar holds

Anthropic's description is a single sentence: the sidebar lists your sessions and lets you run several in parallel. A session is a saved conversation tied to a project directory, so the list is made of conversations rather than files or branches.

Starting work happens in the same column. Click + New in the sidebar, or press Cmd+N on macOS or Ctrl+N on Windows, and the new session joins the list; Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab cycle through the sessions in it. Two sessions can also share the window. Hold Option on macOS or Alt on Windows and click a session in the sidebar for a split view, or hold Cmd or Ctrl and click it to open that session in its own window. In a split view the pane you clicked last has focus, and clicking a session in the sidebar puts it in the pane that has focus. The parallel options are also on our guide to running several Claude Code sessions at once.

This is the app's own list and not a shared one. Anthropic keeps a separate session list for the desktop app, for claude.ai/code and for the VS Code extension, and the terminal has its own as well, which is why a session you cannot find in the sidebar may still be waiting for you in claude --resume. The terminal side is covered further down.

Which sidebar layout you have

There are two sidebars in circulation, and the controls have different names in each. Anthropic's own test takes a second: if a new session has no environment selector under the prompt box, you have the earlier layout.

• Current layout. Claude Desktop v2.37337.0 or later. If yours is older, Anthropic's advice is to update through Claude > Check for Updates… on macOS or Help > Check for Updates… on Windows.
• Earlier layout, because of a third-party provider. When the app runs through a third-party provider with sessions on your own computer, the current layout needs Claude Desktop v3.1623.0 or later.
• Earlier layout, and it stays. When an organisation runs its sessions on its own infrastructure rather than on your computer, Desktop keeps the earlier layout and updating does not change it.

The earlier layout is not just a different skin. Anthropic lists two things it does not have: the session details panel, and saved local and SSH environments. In it you choose the environment and project folder above the prompt box, and the permission mode and model in the row under it.

Grouping and sorting sessions

Both layouts keep grouping behind one icon in the session list, and the difference is whether you have to hover first.

• Current layout. Hover over a heading in the session list and the Group and sort icon appears. Click it to change how the list is grouped and ordered.
• Earlier layout. The Filter icon shows without hovering. Click it to arrange the list with Group by or Sort by.

Anthropic's documentation does not list every value those menus offer, and it never states what the default grouping is. It does use the default when it tells a reader where a started task appears: with the sidebar's default grouping and sorting, look for the newest session in the group for the folder it runs in. That is as close as the documentation comes to saying the default is by folder.

Archived sessions live behind the same icon. In the current layout, View all is the menu's last row and the Archived tab is inside it. In the earlier layout, choose Status and then Archived.

What changed in October 2026

Desktop 2.37337.1 removed grouping by project, and the Group by menu itself stayed. A reader in #102157 listed what it still offered on October 15, 2026: None, Status, Date and Environment, with no Project option and no way to filter by project either. What went was the automatic grouping by working directory, so sessions from one repository were split across environment groups — this computer, Cloud, or an SSH host. #102088, opened on October 14, 2026, reported exactly that.

Anthropic answered in the #102088 thread the next day. A member of the desktop team apologised for shipping the change with no notice, and said every folder and repo would get its own group, listed A to Z, with a repository appearing once wherever its sessions ran. Until the proper option existed, the interim fix put folder grouping inside the environment setting, and that interim step is what came with the instruction to quit and reopen the desktop app, or refresh, to see it. Group by Folder then came back as a permanent option, and #102088 was closed on October 19, 2026 with a note saying so. #102157 was closed on October 21, 2026.

So there are two honest readings of a sidebar that looks wrong today. If sessions from one folder sit under an environment group, that is the interim behaviour the thread describes, where a session goes under its environment if it has one. If Group by Folder is not there, the first thing to settle is which layout you have, above. The earlier layout arranges the list with Group by or Sort by instead, and the threads report Group by Folder in current-layout builds: v2.37337.0 or later, or v3.1623.0 for a third-party-provider install, while an organisation-hosted install keeps the earlier layout whatever it updates to. Beyond that, Anthropic's documentation says nothing about the option being absent.

Sessions nested under other sessions

A session that starts a task in another session is drawn with the started one listed underneath it. Anthropic describes this for a task a session starts: the card shows the started session's state, and the sidebar lists the started session under the current session.

The reports in #102129, opened on October 14, 2026 against the same build, describe the same nesting arriving without a changelog entry and with no setting to turn it off. The mechanics in that thread are worth knowing before you go looking for a setting. Nesting follows the session that started the work, and the readers who name a cause name task cards and background-task chips: a task spun off from a session becomes its child, and tasks spun off from those become grandchildren. It applied retroactively — parent links recorded long before the feature shipped reorganized a month of previously flat history into a tree. And detaching does not cascade: one reader detached a direct child and it moved to the top level with all 57 of its descendants still nested under it, one indent level fewer and the same tree. The issue was still open when its last comment landed on October 19, 2026, and Anthropic's documentation does not list a setting for turning the nesting off.

Finding a session that left the list

Archived sessions are not gone: they sit in the Archived tab behind the group icon, under View all in the current layout and under Status in the earlier one. That is the first place to look.

One cause is worth knowing because it happens without you: a session can archive itself when its pull request merges or closes. The switch is Auto-archive after PR merge or close, in Settings > Claude Code, and Anthropic notes that cloud sessions and sessions that are still running do not archive themselves.

Renaming is a separate control, and it is the one that makes a session easy to spot later. Open the session and click its title in the title bar. Names travel in one direction. Anthropic's rule is that a name you set with --name, with /rename, in the terminal's own picker, or from claude.ai is what claude --resume <name> resolves, while a desktop-app session resumes in the desktop app. Its table adds one exception: renaming a Remote Control session in the Claude app or on claude.ai applies the same name in the CLI.

The same sessions from a terminal

The terminal list is not the app's list, so it is worth knowing what it holds. Anthropic's rule is that the app, claude.ai/code, the VS Code extension and the CLI each keep their own session list; the desktop app can also resume a CLI session. Two commands cover most of it: claude --continue reopens the most recent session in the current directory, and claude --resume opens the picker.

By default the picker shows sessions from the current worktree, including background sessions marked bg, plus sessions started elsewhere that added the current directory. Ctrl+W widens it to every worktree of the repository and Ctrl+A to every project on the machine. Inside the picker, the arrow keys or J and K move, Space previews a session, Ctrl+R renames one, and typing / or any printable character other than Space, J, K or a digit starts a search, and the digits 1 to 9 resume the session at that position directly; pasting a pull request URL finds the session that created it.

Three limits are worth remembering when a session seems to have vanished. Sessions created with claude -p or the Agent SDK are left out of the picker and out of claude --continue, though you can still resume one by its session ID. Sessions whose first prompt was a /loop command are left out of the picker as well, and claude --continue skips them. And the stored conversation itself is on disk: by default Anthropic writes each one as a JSONL file at ~/.claude/projects/<project>/<session-id>.jsonl.

When the sidebar is not the problem

A list of sessions is not the same as a picture of which one needs you. Once several agents are running across several repositories, the question stops being where a session is and starts being which of them is waiting on a person, and that is a different tool. Our guide to running several Claude Code sessions at once covers the parallel setup, and the agent dashboard guide covers what to look for when the list itself is too long to read.

Where Omniscio fits

Omniscio is a separate application, not a replacement for the Claude app, and its left rail answers a different question. The Claude app's sidebar lists the sessions that app holds. Omniscio's sidebar lists the projects you registered, and the sessions running in each of them.

What that looks like in practice, from the sidebar page of Omniscio's library:

• Projects as bars, sessions as dots. Each project is a thin accent bar, and its live sessions are small coloured dots beside it, so a glance down the rail shows which project is busy.
• Colour carries the state. Both the project bar and each session dot are coloured for running, waiting, an error, or needing you.
• A count of the sessions that need you. A project with sessions waiting on you shows a small badge with how many, so you can triage from the rail without opening anything.
• A pinned section. Projects you pin stay above the scrolling list instead of moving with it.
• Keyboard movement. J and K step through your sessions, and the up and down arrows walk the project rows.
• Collapsing. The rail collapses to icons for more chat room, and a thin gutter at the edge brings it back at the width you had.
• Your own sections. Projects can be gathered under named dividers that collapse, expand and remember their state.

That last one has a second form. Omniscio's custom session groups let you make your own collapsible sections, like the built-in ones, out of a tag you flag to show in the sidebar. A group can be global or limited to specific projects, a session can sit in several of them, and an empty group hides itself in a project that has no members. It is worth knowing what a group is not: it is a label rather than a folder, so a running session you put in a group still appears under its normal status section as well. The whole feature is opt-in, part of the tag system, and switched off in a fresh install.

The honest difference is scope. The Claude app's sidebar organises the sessions that app is running, which is exactly right if the Claude app is where you work. Omniscio's rail organises the projects you registered and the sessions running in each of them, which is why it is a different shape of list rather than a better one.