Chat folders & labels
Two lightweight ways to keep a busy sidebar readable without the ceremony of a Space: folders group related chats under a name, and colour labels tag a chat with a dot that follows it everywhere it is listed.
How the sidebar is organised
Chats are grouped by recency - Pinned, Today, Yesterday, This week, Older - with a Folders section between Pinned and the date groups whenever a folder exists. Each row can carry a few markers:
- Icons - a pin on pinned chats, a fork on forked chats, and the Spaces icon on chats that belong to a Space (shown only when neither of the other two takes the slot).
- Activity - a spinner while the chat is generating or waiting in the queue, and an accent dot when a reply finished (or failed) while you were in another chat.
The per-row … menu (or a right-click) offers Pin this chat / Unpin, Label, Move to Space (see Spaces), Rename, Remove from folder (for filed chats), Move to archive and Delete, which asks first. The chat header’s menu has the same chat actions except Remove from folder, plus Search in chat, Fork this chat and Export context / Import context. A quiet Archived row at the bottom of the sidebar leads to the archive.
Folders
Drag one chat row onto another. Loach asks for a folder name and files both chats into it; if the chat you drop onto is already in a folder, the dragged chat simply joins that folder. Folders are flat - they never nest. A new folder opens expanded, each folder shows how many chats it holds, and Loach remembers which folders you left open between launches.
- File a chat - drop it onto a folder.
- Take a chat out - drop it onto a date caption (Today, Yesterday, …), or pick Remove from folder in the row menu.
- Pinned chats - a filed chat leaves the date groups, but a pinned one still appears under Pinned as well. Dropping a chat on the Pinned caption does nothing; pin it from its menu.
- Rename / Delete folder - from the folder’s own menu (or right-click it). Deleting a folder never deletes chats; they move back to the main list.
/folder <name>- files the open chat into the folder with that name (matched exactly, ignoring case), or creates a folder by that name if there isn’t one./folder nonetakes the chat out of its folder. See Slash commands.
Filing a chat doesn’t change its place in the order - chats inside a folder are still sorted by when they were last active. A fork starts in the same folder as its source.
Colour labels
Tag any chat Red, Amber, Green, Blue, Purple or Pink from the Label submenu of any chat menu - the sidebar row, the chat header or the Space view. The colour renders as a dot at the start of the row in the sidebar and in the Space view. No label clears it. You can also type /label <colour> - red, amber, green, blue, purple or pink - or /label clear in the open chat. Labelling a chat doesn’t move it in the list, and a fork starts unlabelled.
Labels carry no built-in meaning, so use them however suits you: red for “needs a follow-up”, green for “done”, one colour per client, and so on.
The sidebar on narrow windows
Below 1080 px the sidebar gets out of the way on its own: opening a right-hand panel (the code canvas or the parameters panel) folds it to its icon rail so the transcript keeps a usable width, and restores it when the right slot empties again. A manual toggle (Ctrl + Shift + S, or the sidebar button in the title bar) always wins - flipping the sidebar yourself cancels the pending restore.
Folders and labels only change how chats are listed. When several chats should also share instructions, reference files or memory, that is a job for a Space.