[Feature Request] Desktop sidebar: nested sub-groups within a project group
Feature request
Support nested sub-groups under a project group in the desktop app's session sidebar: a parent project heading with user-named child groups beneath it, each holding its own sessions.
Use case
A long-running research project accumulates many sessions that naturally cluster by sub-topic. Concretely: a geoscience project where one workstream ("Thermal Gradient Anchors") covers ~17 named wells, each of which gets multiple sessions over months. Today all of those land in one flat project group, ordered by recency, so finding "the sessions about well X" means scanning the whole list or maintaining a manual title-prefix convention.
Desired shape:
▾ Thermal Gradient Anchors
▸ (broad / cross-topic sessions)
▸ Bissa
▸ Anderville
▸ BN 1-9
...Current state / workarounds
- The sidebar supports filter (status / project / environment) and group-by-project, but a group is a flat, recency-ordered list — no substructure, no pinning (#70104).
- Sub-folders of the same git repo collapse into a single block keyed at the repo root, so separate working directories inside one repo can't be used to fake sub-groups (#64354, closed stale).
- Workarounds in practice: session-title prefixes ("Bissa — …"), or umbrella directories of symlinks outside the repo to mint extra top-level groups. Both work but are manual and pollute either titles or the top-level sidebar.
Related open/closed asks (consolidating)
- #68171 — group sessions into folders/collections (open; closest sibling)
- #70104 — reorder/pin session groups (open)
- #64354 — nest same-repo sub-folders as separate blocks (closed, stale)
- #59016 — organize chats in folders by project (closed)
- #66877 — scope to a subfolder of a multi-folder workspace (closed; adjacent)
- #68262 — subfolders within a claude.ai Project (open; same ask on the claude.ai side)
Suggested minimal version
Even without full hierarchy: user-defined labels/tags on sessions, with the sidebar able to group by label within a project group, would cover the use case. Manual assignment is fine; no automation needed.
3 Comments
I was on the fly to create the same issue. so I like to comment here to support it. 👍
My Case:
I create custom groups to organize sessions within a specific project, but currently the only way to see that group is to switch the whole sidebar to custom view, which hides all sessions from other projects — making it hard to keep working across multiple projects while a custom group exists.
+1. My use case is a bit broader than sub-groups within one project: top-level parent groups that span several folders, e.g. "Agency clients" (one subgroup per client, each with its own sessions), "Personal projects" and "External clients". Today I work around it with one flat group per client (cluttered sidebar) or a single "Agency clients" group. Inside it, session titles don't show their folder, so I end up renaming every session to the client name.
Same request for me, I have lots of sessions I manage in parallel and I need to come back to later, so would be nice to be able to organize things into folders and sub folders ( Eg, Marketing, Dev/Features, Dev/Bugs, etc)