Chat Tabs

Chat Tabs puts the current conversation and pinned chats within reach in BB, without replacing the sidebar or changing BB core. See the screenshots and setup guide.

What you get

• A single unpinned preview behaves like a VS Code preview tab: opening another unpinned chat replaces it, and italic text communicates its temporary state. Pinning that chat leaves no preview until another unpinned chat is opened. Background work never opens a preview; nested workflow activity folds up to the visible parent tab's working marker.
• Double-click a preview to pin it. Double-click a pinned tab title to rename it inline, with Escape cancelling the change. A tab context menu sized like BB's native sidebar actions provides Copy link, Mark as unread, Pin/Unpin, modal Rename, and Archive. Archive uses the BB host action and removes the plugin tab immediately.
• Pinned tabs form one manually ordered horizontal sequence across projects. Desktop drag and drop shows one highlighted slot and edge autoscroll; preview tabs never participate. Hover text gives the complete project and chat titles and explains primary click behavior. Unread state has its own dot, independent of working activity.
• The New chat composer has an immediately visible pinned-chat list. It uses the same global order: title on the first line, project on the left of the second, and only useful Working and/or Unread status on the right. Calm chats have no filler status. Preview does not enter this list, and the showPinnedTabsList setting hides it without changing pins.
• The desktop strip supports horizontal mouse-wheel scrolling, a theme-aware top scrollbar only when necessary, middle-click close, Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab, and Desktop Ctrl+W / ⌘W. When the embedded BrowserView has focus, the native browser tab close keeps priority. Compact and touch layouts preserve native horizontal swipe, 44×44 targets, and explicit Close actions instead of HTML drag and drop.
• A borderless plus directly after the last tab opens BB's native composer. Hovering for 300 ms offers the 15 projects with the newest chat activity; More reveals subsequent groups of 15 on click or a 300 ms hover. Picking a project preselects it. Both menus animate, with reduced-motion support.
• The list icon opens the same Radix dropdown by click, after 300 ms of hover, or with a double Shift press. Type to search available chats by title (including unloaded history pages), choose with the arrow keys and open with Enter. Manually ordered Pinned chats precede History of up to 100 visits. Eight history records render at a time; More loads the next page on click, tap, keyboard selection or after 300 ms of hover. Section visibility settings do not delete pins or history.
• Lifecycle data comes from public archive/delete/unarchive events and bounded bb.sdk.threads.get() reconciliation, not from sidebar omission. Archive or delete removes a chat from tabs, pins, and the home list while preserving a disabled Archived or Deleted tombstone in history. Unarchiving re-enables it but deliberately does not restore its old pin or preview. Transient and permission errors never hide a chat as deleted.
• Tabs and history use plugin-owned KV keys and realtime events. Realtime and live sidebar state are the primary source of activity; durable workflow status is a visibility-aware, rate-limited fallback through the built-in workflows public RPC. Client and server coalesce equivalent requests.
• The scoped CSS hybrid operates in a single main pane. It follows the main chat width around a right panel, but hides in true split, full-panel, and drawer states. All presentation uses BB theme tokens (background, foreground, muted, border, popover, primary, and ring) with color-mix(in oklch).