[FEATURE]: Vertical tabs

Feature hasn't been suggested before.

I have verified this feature I'm about to request hasn't been suggested before.

Describe the enhancement you want to request

The new UI forces horizontal tabs, which make it really difficult to see more than 5 session titles at once.

I really wish we had a way for the tabs to be horizontal, similar to how the sessions were shown in the old UI.

Vertical tabs are a really popular feature amongst programmers, so this feels like a no-brainer!

This issue might be a duplicate of existing issues. Please check:

Desktop: wtf is the new tab layout, tab titles dont fit anymore on screen #36936: Reports the same problem with the new horizontal tab layout making it hard to see session titles, and explicitly mentions vertical tabs as the preferred solution.

是的，之前我只需要两步，现在我需要三步，我希望标签页水平排列

Please this new horizontal tabs kill Opencode Desktop! PLEASE REVERT OR ADD A SETTING! PLEASE!

I was very sad to see that the old layout will be discontinued. I don't love the tabs, I'd rather have it all separated by project and using vertical tabs so I can read more of each chat's name. I'm a horizontal tabs guy in smth like chrome, but in an AI chat interface I want vertical tabs separated by project.

+1

I want to add a stronger voice to this — not just a +1, but a pointed critique of the design direction.

The horizontal tabs experiment has been a demonstrable failure from day one. Let me enumerate:

Functional regression, not iteration. v1.18 shipped with Plan/Build toggle missing ([Bug] Desktop App v1.18.1 new layout hides agent (Plan/Build) switching UI #36997, Bug: Plan/Build mode toggle missing from chat UI after latest update #37070), agent switching broken ([Bug]: Agents not visible when switching with Ctrl+. + folders not expanding in central file explorer (Desktop v1.18.1, Windows) #36979), Ctrl+B sidebar toggle dead (Desktop App: 'Toggle Sidebar' menu option (Ctrl+B) is unresponsive in new UI #29902), and folders not expanding in the file explorer. These aren't "teething issues" — they're evidence that the new UI was pushed out before it was ready, and the old sidebar had none of these problems.
Horizontal tabs are the wrong paradigm for this product. Chrome gets away with horizontal tabs because tab titles are predictable domain names. AI agent sessions have long, descriptive, auto-generated titles that get truncated to ~8 characters after 5+ tabs. The old sidebar showed full titles in a scrollable vertical list organized by project and workspace — the exact information hierarchy this use case demands.
You're solving a problem your users don't have. The pitch for tabs is "multi-session in one window." But the old sidebar already handled multi-session perfectly — with the added benefit of project-level organization, workspace nesting, and visible full-length session names. The tab redesign broke a working system to add browser chrome that nobody asked for.
"We'll keep the old UI for a limited time" is not a compromise — it's a threat. You're telling your users: adapt to the worse experience we chose for you, or go use something else. This is not how you treat a community that has spent months filing detailed bug reports, contributing PRs, and building skills for your platform.
The Codex envy is transparent and misguided. PR feat: redesign sidebar with Codex-style unified view #20242 was literally titled "redesign sidebar with Codex-style unified view." You're chasing a competitor's UI instead of listening to your own users. Codex users aren't leaving Codex because it has a different sidebar — and your users aren't staying because you copied one.

Here's what would actually show you're listening:

Commit to keeping the sidebar + vertical session list as a permanent option, not a "limited time transition period."
If you must have tabs, implement them as vertical tabs inside the existing sidebar layout — same information density, same project hierarchy, same full-length session names.
Ship the worktree integration you promised before removing the layout people rely on for it.

The 9 👍 on this issue and the flood of bug reports on the new UI aren't resistance to change — they're your users telling you, clearly, that this design is worse. Ignore that at your platform's peril.

@Brendonovich

I put together an opt-in implementation of vertical tabs and opened a PR for it (linked below).

It's fully non-destructive — horizontal tabs remain the default, and it's all behind a Settings → General → "Vertical tabs" toggle. Highlights:

Session tabs move into a resizable sidebar rail, showing full-length titles (the main ask here).
Collapsible to an icon-only strip with hover-to-reveal.
Optional "Tabs on the right" placement (full left/right mirror).
The session header is enriched with project name, git branch/worktree, and a working indicator so context isn't lost when tabs are narrow.

@Brendonovich since this is assigned to you — happy to adjust the approach, split it up, or hand off pieces if you're already working on something. Just wanted to offer a concrete, working starting point given the demand here.

Please don't remove the vertical/side tab layout in future updates. Having both horizontal and vertical as a user-selectable option (like in this PR) would be good. Also, vertical tabs work much better with WorkTrees — switching between branches and sessions is far more convenient with a side rail. Thank you for working on this.

I agree that vertical tabs would be a significant improvement, but I think we could go one step further and make the navigation hierarchy more explicit.

Instead of having one tab per session/conversation, I would suggest:

One top-level tab per project : the current horizontal
A vertical sidebar listing the sessions/conversations for the currently selected project

This would solve the current problem at its root: projects and conversations are two different levels of navigation, so they should not compete for the same tab bar.

It would also scale much better for users who have many sessions open. A project would remain easy to identify, while its conversations could be browsed vertically in the sidebar.

So I would personally see "vertical tabs" not just as moving the existing session tabs from horizontal to vertical, but as an opportunity to separate project navigation from conversation navigation.

Make people decide what they want. If I want vertical tabs or horizontal tabs I can choose.

@Brendonovich

Thanks everyone for the reactions!

Based on that, this [FEATURE] request is now in the top 5 most requested (even higher if we combine totals from the duplicate issues).

@Brendonovich Any chance this will get worked on anytime soon?

I don't care as much since I've found OpenChamber (that offers tabs in both orientations), but I still wish OpenCode would get this too...

I fully support this! The new horizontal tabs at the top make it really hard to see and manage more than a few sessions at once — titles get cramped and unreadable

A vertical tab layout on the left side (like in the old UI, or like Claude Code desktop / Codex) would make it much easier to scan, switch between, and manage many sessions. I'd love to see this as an option, or even as the default

me too
ps: looking for app with vertical tabs and full compatibility with opencode

Actualmente están trabajando en manejar los proyectos en pestañas verticales? Necesito novedades, tengo 4 proyectos en simultaneo y no se puede usar OpenCode Destokp, estos migrando todo a Warp

@thdxr

Also affected — juggling 4-5 parallel sessions across projects is a daily need for me too, and horizontal tabs make session titles unreadable past ~4 tabs.

Note that #37273 (session sidebar alongside tabs) and #40870 (auto-scroll to top of new response) partially overlap — the underlying pain is the same: the new layout optimizes for "one active session at a time" while many users actively juggle several.

@thdxr @fwang — with users starting to migrate to alternatives (Warp mentioned above), even a small step like re-enabling the sidebar toggle beyond the 14-Sep sunset date would buy time while a proper vertical-tabs feature ships.

The current top tab bar (instead of a sidebar session stack, which is standard in AI chat UIs) is prone to accidental session loss. While trying to switch to a session, I accidentally clicked the close (X) button that appears on the tab, and the entire long session was deleted with no way to recover it.

Suggestion: Replace the tab bar with a sidebar list of sessions, like most other AI chat interfaces use. This prevents accidental deletions and makes session management more intuitive.

Who thought it was a good idea to use horizontal tabs, when using 4+ agents at the same time?
Plus hide all my current agents, so I need extra clicks to find them... this is terrible UX for seasoned users.

I'm trying to maintain my fork with the old UI which is superior in many ways, I can't get a grasp of why would you make obsolte something that was 10/10 functional.

pretty please?

Looking forward to enabling the vertical mode for displaying labels.

The horizontal label style is terrible.

Addressed in OpenCode V2: the TUI supports a vertical session-tab sidebar via tabs.layout: "vertical" in cli.json, and Desktop offers Settings → General → Tab layout → Vertical. Closing the feature request as resolved in V2. The linked #38308 is a separate, still-open PR targeting dev; this closure does not mean that PR was merged.

https://opencode.ai/v2/docs

I strongly support this feature request and hope it will be considered for implementation.

When working with multiple projects and many sessions, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify which project each tab belongs to, especially when tab titles are truncated or similar.

Other applications, such as ChatGPT Codex, already provide a more organized workspace for managing work across multiple projects. This makes it much easier to navigate between projects and keep related sessions organized.

It would be great if OpenCode Desktop could support grouping tabs by project, displaying the project name clearly, and allowing groups to be collapsed or expanded.

I believe this would be a significant usability improvement for developers who regularly work on multiple projects simultaneously. It would make the desktop experience cleaner, more intuitive, and much easier to manage.

Please consider prioritizing this feature. I think it would make a real difference in everyday development workflows.

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[FEATURE]: Vertical tabs #36942

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[FEATURE]: Vertical tabs #36942

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