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Claude Code: Session Groups in the VS Code Sidebar

Claude CodeView original changelog

Anthropic added session groups to the Claude Code VS Code sidebar in version 2.1.229, letting developers organize multiple active sessions instead of scrolling through one flat list. Users can right-click to create, rename, or delete a group, and use Cmd/Ctrl-click or Shift-click to select and move several sessions into a group at once. The feature targets developers who run many parallel Claude Code sessions inside VS Code and previously had no built-in way to categorize them by project, task, or priority.

Key Takeaways

  • Native session grouping arrives in VS Code, letting developers organize Claude Code sessions into named, sidebar-level groups instead of one long flat list.
  • Right-click controls handle the basics — creating a new group, renaming it, or deleting it — without needing a separate settings panel.
  • Bulk selection speeds up organization: Cmd/Ctrl-click or Shift-click lets developers move several sessions into a group in one action rather than dragging them individually.
  • Targets heavy multi-session users, particularly developers running Claude Code across multiple projects, branches, or clients simultaneously inside the same VS Code window.
  • Ships alongside mostly infrastructure work in 2.1.229, including self-hosted runner hooks, gateway SSE keepalives, and a new plugin marketplace source type — none of which are user-facing features in their own right.
  • /commit-push-pr also got safer in this release, no longer auto-approving dangerous flags like --force or --no-verify without explicit confirmation.

New in Claude Code 2.1.229

Session Groups in the VS Code Sidebar

Claude Code's VS Code extension now lets developers organize their sessions into groups directly in the sidebar. Until this release, every active or past session appeared in one continuous list, which became unwieldy for anyone juggling several Claude Code sessions across different projects or tasks at once.

With 2.1.229, right-clicking inside the sidebar brings up options to create a new group, rename an existing one, or delete a group entirely. To move sessions into a group, users can hold Cmd or Ctrl (or Shift, for a contiguous range) to select multiple sessions at once and relocate them together, rather than dragging sessions one at a time.

Why It Matters

The addition addresses a workflow pain point for power users who keep many Claude Code sessions open in parallel — for example, separating sessions by client project, by feature branch, or by "active" versus "waiting for review." Grouping and bulk-selection bring the sidebar closer to the kind of tab-management developers already expect from browsers and editors, reducing the time spent hunting for a specific session in a long, unsorted list.

Also in This Release

Version 2.1.229 shipped alongside this feature, though the rest of the release skews toward infrastructure and reliability work rather than user-facing features: self-hosted runner hook support, SSE keepalive pings for gateway streaming, a new plugin marketplace command source type, and a long list of bug fixes covering streaming display glitches, crash fixes for malformed tool-call arguments, Windows extended-path handling, and MCP OAuth redirect behavior. Claude Code also changed /commit-push-pr so that dangerous git/gh flags (--force, --amend, --no-verify, and similar) are no longer auto-approved, requiring explicit confirmation before running.