Sort sidebar projects by most recent activity

[gengjiawen]

What am I trying to do?

Keep the handful of projects I'm actively working in at the top of the sidebar. I run agents across many repos on one host; at any moment only two or three of them are hot, and those are the ones I keep jumping back to.

How do I do it today?

The Project view has a persisted manual drag order, and newly discovered projects append to the bottom. So I either keep re-dragging the currently hot projects to the top, or I scan the whole list for the project I touched five minutes ago.

Where does Paseo get in the way?

While working with agents, recency is the navigation signal — "the project where an agent just finished" is almost always where I'm headed next. The sidebar already has this data: workspace rows can show a Last activity timestamp, and Status grouping is time-aware. But project ordering can't use it; a project stays wherever its manual position is, no matter how hot it is right now.

What would the flow look like if it worked?

A "Sort projects" choice in the sidebar display-preferences menu:

• Manual — today's behavior, the default; drag order stays authoritative.
• Recent activity — the project whose workspaces have the freshest activity sorts first.

Details that felt right when I prototyped it:

• Recency per project = the newest statusEnteredAt across its workspace entries — the same merged workspace/agent timestamp the rows already display, so no new data plumbing.
• Projects with no timestamp keep their manual relative order, after the dated ones.
• Pinned section untouched; the option only applies to Project grouping.
• The preference persists; switching back to Manual restores the untouched drag order.
• In Recent mode a drag-drop does not overwrite the stored manual order (the drop position comes from a sorted view, so it says nothing about the manual order).

I've implemented this as a small local patch (a persisted projectSort preference in the sidebar view store, a pure recency sort over the filtered project entries in the sidebar model, menu entry + i18n + unit tests, ~250 lines) and have been running it on web. It behaves well alongside pinning, filters, and drag reorder. Happy to turn it into a PR if there's interest.

For context: #2626 asked for the same thing and was closed through feature-request intake, so bringing it here as a workflow instead.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[gengjiawen]

Folding this into #4487, which covers the same workflow (a sidebar you can still navigate with a lot of projects) and has the traction this thread doesn't. @ChrisjanWust raised recency sorting there independently, which is a better signal of shared need than my own thread.

Implementation, screenshots and QA: #4487 (comment)

Continuing there so it's one conversation rather than two.

[ChrisjanWust]

UI looks perfect! Will save me a lot of time.