Thread Names

nikushiksThread Management
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Names each thread "category: name" in lowercase, like "fix: login redirect loop", so a long sidebar reads at a glance. Eight categories for coding work come built in, and the settings page takes up to 16 of your own plus sample names in the style you want. Once you pick it as the thread-title service in bb settings, a thread whose title is not yet in that form gets a new one after a finished turn, at most twice. A thread you rename by hand after it got such a name keeps your title. Titles come from bb cloud, so the plugin needs a signed-in bb account with bb cloud on, and each title uses its daily AI budget; it needs no API key.

Overview

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What you get

A sidebar of parallel threads reads like this:

feat: csv export
fix: login redirect loop
review: rate limiter changes
ops: staging deploy pipeline

The category is one word for the kind of work. The name is two or three words about the subject of the task, in the language the task is written in. Everything is lowercase. The default categories are feat, fix, refactor, review, docs, research, ops and agents, each with a short description of the work it covers.

Your own categories

The plugin's settings page has two fields. Categories takes one category per line as name: what it covers, from 1 to 16 of them. Example names takes up to 12 sample titles that show the model the style; an example whose category is not in your list is left out. bb refuses a value that breaks the format and says what is wrong. The same fields can be set from a terminal with bb plugin config thread-names set categories "...".

How it works

The plugin adds a thread-title service called Short thread names. After you select it with bb settings ai-services set thread-title short-names --plugin thread-names, it takes bb's title request, keeps the thread material (the task, later messages, agent replies, the current title), puts the naming rules and your categories on top, and sends it to bb cloud, the service that writes bb's default titles. The reply is lowercased before bb shows it.

When a first prompt is shorter than five words, bb keeps the prompt text as the title. After each finished turn, the plugin regenerates the title of any thread that is not yet in the category: name form, at most twice per thread. A thread that had the form and was then renamed by hand is left alone. A request that is not a title, such as a commit message, passes to bb cloud unchanged.

To go back to bb's own titles, run bb settings ai-services set thread-title automatic.

Requirements

  • bb 0.49 or later.
  • A bb account signed in on this bb, with bb cloud on. Titles count against the bb cloud daily budget, and no API key is needed.
  • Turning bb cloud off with bb ai off stops the service at once.

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Top TabsSwitch between the threads you are working on from a row of tabs across the top of the bb window. Every thread you open gets a tab with bb's status glyph, so a thread that is working, needs input, or has unread output shows without the sidebar. Close tabs with × or a middle-click, drag them to reorder, and cycle through them with Ctrl+Tab. Right-click a tab for bb's thread menu plus Close other tabs and Close tabs to the right. Tabs are stored per window on your machine, with no account or external service; requires bb 0.49 or later.New

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