🗂️ A project filter for people with dozens of small projects: an always-visible icon row with status badges

[chomamateusz]

Problem

The sidebar fits one or two large codebases with many threads in each. I use T3 Code the other way round: about thirty small projects from unrelated areas (software, marketing, bookkeeping, personal admin, 3D printing), a few threads in each, spread over several machines. On a given day I work in five or six of them, and I change that set several times a day.

The project filter in the sidebar header already helps: I can pick a project, or shift-click to pick several. With this many projects, three things are missing:

• I can't see the selection. What is filtered, and what else exists, is only visible while the dropdown is open.
• I can't see what needs me outside the filter. Once I narrow the list to six projects, an approval waiting in one of the other twenty is out of sight.
• There is no "everything except these". Some projects are long-running and noisy. I want them out of the way without settling their threads or archiving the project. Keep project groups together in the new sidebar and let me hide projects #35136 asks for the same thing.

What I have been running

I have used the following in a fork every day for the past few weeks. A row of project icons sits under Search and replaces the header dropdown. It edits the same stored selection as the existing filter and Filter by project, so there is no server or contract change. The screenshots come from a dev build with demo data: three machines, 27 projects.

1. No filter. Every project gets a folder. With 27 projects the list runs far past the bottom of the window.
2. Only what I am working on. Six projects and No project are selected. This is the layout I keep open all day: my pinned threads on top, the folder I am working in open, the others closed with their counts. Each icon carries a badge, and +N carries one for the projects that do not fit in the row, so I still notice an approval waiting outside my selection.
3. The same set on one machine, with a second folder open. The machine row is the filter discussed in [Feature]: Add an environment filter to the Sidebar #6955 and feat(web): filter sidebar projects and threads by environment #25069. The project row does not depend on it.

1. All projects. The icon order is a setting: pinned first and then by name, by latest activity (used here), or my own order. What does not fit goes into +N.
2. Click one project to see only that project, here with its folder open. Click the icon again to clear.
3. ⌘-click (Ctrl-click on Windows and Linux) adds or removes a project.
4. Hide selected. The eye button flips the row from "show only these" to "show everything except these": the same three projects are now the ones left out. Each mode keeps its own saved list.

1. Hovering an icon shows the machines that have the project, its thread counts per state, the click model and the badge legend.
2. +N lists every project with the same badges and a search field.
3. The eye button's menu: show or hide the selection, group threads by project, sidebar settings.
4. New thread lists only the filtered projects, with All projects… below them.

What I would like to know

• Would you want an always-visible project row in the sidebar, or should the header dropdown stay the only project filter?
• If only part of this is interesting, the two pieces I would miss most are the status badges per project and the Hide mode. Either could be added to the existing dropdown without the row.

Related: #34785 proposes a vertical project rail with the same activity signals, #33359 a custom project order, #31803 pinning inside a project folder. I posted earlier screenshots of the machine filter in #6955.

The code is on my fork as a patch on top of main: project row, new threads start inside the filter. I am not opening a PR. If a maintainer wants any part of it as one, I am happy to prepare it.

[Xyttra]

I'd love to see this on main