Filtering and Muting Your Agent List

Once you're running more than a handful of agents, the lower half of your sidebar — your sections, pins, channels, direct messages and agents — gets crowded. Some agents are waiting on you right now. Some are quietly idle. A few might not have done anything in a week. DorkOS gives you two simple controls to cut through that: show filters and mute. The Agents list also keeps itself short on its own.

Neither control deletes or hides an agent for good. They just change what's on screen, and each is one click away from showing everything again. They're separate from Heads up and Today, the two parts of the sidebar that DorkOS fills in for you automatically. Those aren't something you filter or organise.

The Agents list stays short on its own

Agents shows the agents you have used lately and the ones you pinned, then a single All N agents → row that opens your team page. "Lately" counts the last time you looked at an agent, not only the last time it ran, so an agent you have not touched in a month stops costing a row. If you have eight agents or fewer, you still see all of them.

Nothing is hidden by this. Everything you don't see in the sidebar is on the team page, one click away, and ⌘K still finds any agent by name.

Show only what matters

Every section, and the "Agents" section itself, has a Show menu with three options:

• All: every agent in that section.
• Active: only agents that are working right now, or that need your attention.
• Needs attention: only agents waiting on you, like an approval or a failed run.

Open a section's ⋮ menu, or right-click it, and pick Show. Switch a busy "Clients" section to Needs attention and it drops down to just the agents actually waiting on you, no scrolling required.

Filters are per-section: each one remembers its own choice, and the "Agents" section has its own too. Switching one section's filter never touches another.

Muting an agent or a section

Sometimes an agent, or a whole section, is doing a lot of work you don't need to watch closely right now: an experiment, a background job, something you'll check on later. Muting quiets it down without removing it from the sidebar.

Right-click an agent, or open its ⋮ menu, and choose Mute agent. A muted agent:

• Keeps its name just as easy to read, with a small mute icon beside it. Muting drops signals, not legibility.
• Stops showing its activity badge, the small coloured dot for "working" or "needs you", and stops going bold or carrying an unread count.
• Never lights up a section's activity dot, even while it's actively working.
• Stays exactly where it is, and stays fully clickable. Muting is a display choice, not a way to turn an agent off.

Muting a whole section works the same way, from the section's ⋮ menu: every member renders muted while the section stays muted, and the section's own activity dot goes dark too. Unmute the section and every member goes right back to whatever its own mute state was before. Muting a section never changes an individual agent's mute setting underneath it.

Smart sections: lists that keep themselves organized

A regular section is a list you build by hand: you drag things into it, and they stay there until you move them out. A section can hold anything you see in the sidebar, so a channel, a conversation and an agent can sit side by side in one.

Once you're running a lot of agents, or a mix of runtimes like Claude Code and Codex, hand-tuning a list of agents gets old fast. Agents finish work, go idle, switch projects, and your section falls out of date.

A smart section fills itself in. Instead of a list of agents, it holds a rule, like "agents that are active or need me right now." Every time the sidebar refreshes, DorkOS checks the rule against your fleet and shows whoever matches. An idle agent drops off the list. A new agent starts working and joins in. You never touch it.

Creating one

Open the New menu, either the New button at the top of the sidebar or the + on a heading, and choose Section. You'll see one-click starters:

• Active now: agents that need you or are actively working.
• By runtime: one starter per runtime you're running, like "By runtime · Codex," for any runtime with two or more agents.

Pick one and the section appears instantly, already filled in. Want an empty one to fill yourself? Choose Empty section. Want something more specific? Choose Custom rules… to build your own: which runtimes, which namespaces, which status (active, needs attention, idle, or inactive), how recently active, or agents whose folder starts with a certain path. Combine as many of these as you want. Every rule you add narrows the section further.

Whichever way you start one, and whether you started it from the New button or from a row's right-click menu, the name box opens in the same place: the top of the list.

Always honest about what it's showing

A smart section tells you exactly what rule it's running. Open its ⋮ menu and you'll see a plain-English summary, like "Codex · active in the last hour," right above the usual options.

If nothing matches the rule, the section doesn't disappear. It shows "No agents match these rules," so you always know it's there and working, just empty for now.

There's no Mute on a smart section. A rule-built list is worked out fresh every time you look at it, so muting it could never stick, and an option that quietly does nothing is worse than no option.

You can't drag an agent into a smart section either. Its membership comes from the rule, so dropping an agent on it shows a reminder to edit the rule instead. An agent that matches a smart section's rule still shows up in whatever section you filed it in by hand. Nothing gets moved out from where you put it.

Editing or converting

Change your mind about the rule any time: open the section's ⋮ menu and choose Edit rules. The same form you used to create it comes back, prefilled with the current rule.

If you'd rather freeze today's members and manage the list by hand from here on, choose Convert to manual section. DorkOS takes whoever matches right now, drops them into a regular section with that same name, and you're free to add, remove and reorder them yourself.

Sorting a heading

Channels and Direct messages each remember how you want them sorted, by name or by what happened most recently. That choice lives in the heading's ⋮ menu, and each one keeps its own.

A section you built sorted by Recent activity puts channels and conversations in the right place alongside your agents, by whatever happened in them last.

Where these settings live

Show filters, mute, sort order and your sections are all saved to your account, the same as pinning, so they follow you across the desktop app and the browser. They don't affect anyone else on a shared DorkOS instance.

Next steps