Skip to content

[FEATURE]: Improve Agent Navigation: Tree View, Alphabetical Sorting, and Active/Inactive Filtering #6335

Closed

Description

@luketych

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

Improve Agent Navigation: Tree View, Alphabetical Sorting, and Active/Inactive Filtering

Problem / Motivation

Managing many agents (10–20+) becomes cumbersome with the current agent selector UI:

  • Agents are shown in a long, flat list
  • The list is not alphabetical, making scanning difficult
  • Agents with long descriptions consume significant vertical space
  • There’s no clear way to:
    • group related agents
    • mirror filesystem organization
    • hide or close inactive / stopped agents
  • Navigation via Tab / Shift+Tab becomes unwieldy at scale

This makes multi-agent workflows harder than necessary, especially for users running many specialized agents or namespaces.


Proposed Solution (Minimal Viable Improvements)

Alphabetical Sorting

  • Sort agents alphabetically by name as a baseline
  • This alone would significantly improve usability

Hierarchical / Tree-Based Agent View (Filesystem-Mirrored)

Allow agents to be grouped via a simple path or namespace convention, for example:

git/commit-agent
git/review-agent
infra/docker-agent
infra/k8s-agent
rag/ingest-agent
rag/retrieval-agent

Rendered as:

git/
 ├─ commit-agent
 └─ review-agent
infra/
 ├─ docker-agent
 └─ k8s-agent
rag/
 ├─ ingest-agent
 └─ retrieval-agent

This would:

  • Mirror how users already organize agents on disk
  • Reduce cognitive load
  • Scale cleanly with many agents
  • Avoid introducing new configuration formats

Active vs Inactive Agent Filtering

  • Provide a way to hide or collapse inactive / stopped agents
  • Examples:
    • Show only active agents
    • Archive inactive agents
    • Visually dim inactive agents

This avoids cycling through inactive agents just to find the few currently in use.


Optional Enhancements (Nice-to-Have)

  • 2D navigation:
    • Left/right → namespace
    • Up/down → agents within namespace
  • Collapsible descriptions (single-line vs expanded)
  • Search / fuzzy filter for agent names
  • Keyboard shortcuts to jump between namespaces

Why This Matters

As users adopt:

  • multi-agent workflows
  • delegated agent responsibilities
  • longer-lived agent processes

…the current flat list does not scale well.

A tree-based, alphabetical, filterable agent selector would:

  • dramatically improve usability
  • align with existing filesystem mental models
  • reduce friction for power users
  • remain simple for users with only a few agents

Willingness to Contribute

Happy to help prototype or implement this if there’s alignment on direction (UI + data model).

Activity

  1. added
    discussionUsed for feature requests, proposals, ideas, etc. Open discussion
    on Dec 29, 2025
  2. chaddm commented on Jan 17, 2026

    @chaddm

    I think that sorted order is badly needed, but I would prefer not having to navigate a tree. Nested directories tend to get out of hand, IMHO. My suggestion would be to allow a namespace option for agents and show the list in sorted order with namespaces in front for those that have it. Navigation would would aways be up/right and down/left, which is intuitive. But, what would be the icing on top would be fzf-style search. For your list, being able to hit tab then type gcom<enter> would be amazing.

  3. luketych commented on Jan 18, 2026

    @luketych
    Author

    Well hopefully @thdxr can take a look and give someone his opinions

  4. github-actions commented on Mar 27, 2026

    @github-actions
    Contributor

    To stay organized issues are automatically closed after 90 days of no activity. If the issue is still relevant please open a new one.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

discussionUsed for feature requests, proposals, ideas, etc. Open discussion

Type

No type

Projects

No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions