Repo Sidebar Organization

As the number of repositories in your sidebar grows, Workbench offers three ways to group them — accessible from the Group by control in the sidebar’s filter menu (the funnel icon at the top of the sidebar): Status, Repo, and Collections.

Repo Mode: Smart Sections

When Group by is set to Repo, the sidebar automatically organizes your repositories into three collapsible sections:

• Favorites — repositories you’ve pinned, sorted by most recent activity.
• Recent — the 10 most recently active repositories that aren’t favorited. The order updates live: as soon as you act in a repo (send a prompt, type in a terminal, create a workspace, scan for worktrees), it moves to the top of the section without a restart.
• All Repositories — everything else, in your manual sort order. A newly added repository is placed at the top of this order.

Each section header shows a repo count and can be collapsed independently by clicking it. All Repositories starts collapsed by default whenever you have any Favorites or Recent entries, so the sidebar leads with what you’re actively working on; it expands automatically once there’s nothing above it to make room for.

Repositories that don’t have a favorite or recent-activity signal yet — for example, one you just added — still show up under All Repositories until they accumulate activity. A repository you’ve just added always lands at the top of that section, so it’s the first thing you see when you expand it.

These three sections cover repositories on this machine. Repositories served by a remote connection are grouped under that connection instead, with their own Favorites — see Favorites on remote connections below.

Favorites

Right-click any repository in the sidebar and choose Add to Favorites (or Remove from Favorites if it’s already pinned). Favorited repositories:

• Show a star icon next to their name.
• Always appear in the Favorites section at the top of the sidebar in Repo mode, regardless of manual sort order.

Favorites are a good fit for the handful of projects you touch every day across a much larger set of repositories.

Favorites on remote connections

Repositories served by a paired remote connection have their own per-host Favorites, kept separate from your local ones. Right-click a remote repository and choose Add to Favorites and it pins to the top of that connection’s group under a Favorites header, with the rest of that host’s repositories following under All Repositories. The star icon appears on the row exactly as it does locally.

Favorites are segmented by host because the flag is stored in the serving machine’s own database, not on the laptop viewing it. That means:

• Each connection shows only its own favorites, so two servers with a repository of the same name stay distinct.
• The same server shows the same favorites to every machine you drive it from.
• A remote repository never appears in your local Favorites section — it stays inside its connection’s group, where its workspaces, terminals, and context menu live.

The headers only appear once a host has at least one favorite; a connection with no favorites renders as a plain repository list. This works the same whether the connection is listed alongside your local repositories or you’ve focused into it.

Activity Tracking

Workbench tracks a “last activity” timestamp per repository, updated whenever you:

• Create a new workspace in that repository
• Send or receive a chat message in one of its workspaces
• Type into an integrated terminal for one of its workspaces
• Have a worktree discovered under it

This timestamp drives the sort order within Favorites (most recently active first) and determines which repositories qualify for the Recent section. The sidebar re-sorts the moment the timestamp changes, so the repository you’re working in right now is always at the top of its section. There’s no separate setting for this — it happens automatically in the background.

Collections Mode

Set Group by to Collections to organize repositories into your own named groups instead of the automatic Favorites/Recent/All split.

• Create a collection — click the + button next to the Group by control (visible only in Collections mode), type a name, and press Enter.
• Rename or delete a collection — right-click the collection’s header in the sidebar and choose Rename or Delete. Deleting a collection does not delete or archive the repositories in it.
• Assign a repository to collections — right-click a repository and choose Collections… to check or uncheck the collections it belongs to. A repository can belong to multiple collections at once, or none.

Repositories not assigned to any collection appear in an Uncategorized group below your named collections.

Choosing a Mode

Mode	Best for
Status	Seeing all workspaces grouped by running/idle/stopped state, regardless of repository.
Repo	Day-to-day work across a large or growing set of repositories — favorites and recents surface what matters without manual upkeep.
Collections	Deliberately grouping repositories by team, client, or project area, independent of how recently you’ve used them.

Your chosen Group by mode, per-section collapse state, and collection membership all persist locally and are restored the next time you open Workbench.