Stop scrolling your sidebar: nested project groups and search arrive in 1DevTool

If your 1DevTool sidebar has grown into a wall of project entries, you already know the feeling: you finish a meeting, swing back to the app to pick up the side project you were poking at last night, and you scan a flat list of twenty-plus rows looking for the right one. You scroll, you squint, you eventually click. The list is doing what it was designed to do — listing your projects — but at this scale it stops feeling like a sidebar and starts feeling like a directory.

The other version of this same problem: you're switching between client work and personal hacking, and right now they sit shoulder-to-shoulder. There's no visual line between "work" and "not work," so context-switching costs more than it should. The clutter is mostly visual, but visual clutter is what the sidebar is for.

What changed

In v1.17.4 the Projects sidebar gets nested groups, instant search, an export bundle for moving your whole setup to a new machine, and a one-shot prompt formatter for the Agent Input overlay. You can carve your projects into named groups, nest those groups inside other groups, and stop hunting for things visually.

How it works in practice

Group projects by anything that matters to you

Right-click an empty area in the Projects section and pick Create group. Drag any project header onto the group and it lands inside. Each group gets a name, a colored dot, an optional avatar image, and an emoji badge — so a single glance at the sidebar tells you you're looking at "Work / Acme Migrations" and not "Personal / Side Projects."

You can nest a group inside another group by dragging its header onto a parent. Two levels deep is enough to separate "Work / Clients / Acme" from "Work / Internal," and 1DevTool blocks accidental cycles automatically — you can't drag a parent into its own child.

When a group isn't in play right now, click the chevron next to its name to fold it away. The collapsed state is remembered per group, so the sidebar stays calm between sessions instead of resetting to fully expanded every time you launch the app.

Search instead of scroll

There is now a search box at the top of the Projects section. Start typing and the list filters projects and groups by name in real time. If a match lives inside a collapsed group, the parent group auto-expands so the result is always visible — you don't have to know where you organized something to find it. Hit Esc to clear the query and bring the full sidebar back.

The practical effect: if you can remember any fragment of a project's name, you can be inside that project's terminals in two seconds, regardless of how deep it lives or whether you remember which group you put it in.

Format AI prompts like Prettier

The Agent Input overlay now has a one-shot format action. Hit Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+F and your prompt is reflowed: markdown headers and lists tighten up, fenced code blocks are detected, and any embedded JSON, XML, or HTML inside the fences is reformatted into a clean shape before it goes to the agent.

Next to the format action there is a small toggle for auto-format-on-edit. Once on, large pastes and newline-ended edits are reformatted as you go. The setting is remembered so you don't have to flip it on every session. And the formatter is smart about flow: mid-mention (@file) and mid-slash-command edits skip auto-format so your autocomplete isn't interrupted by a sudden reflow.

Move your whole setup to a new machine (PRO)

A new Export sub-tab under Settings → General packages your project list, project groups, sidebar order, custom themes, Obsidian vault path, and supported workspace preferences as a single 1devtool-config-YYYY-MM-DD.json file. Run Import on the destination machine and a preview dialog walks you through what's in the bundle, flags any local project folders that don't exist on the new machine, and lets you Relink Folder or Skip Project before applying. The import is atomic and the app prompts to restart so everything rehydrates cleanly.

Secrets stay home. License activation, GitHub tokens, global database connections with passwords, HTTP client tabs with auth headers, and runtime session state are never written to the export. Only your workspace configuration travels. SSH-mounted projects keep their canonical ssh://user@host:port/path identity, not the temporary local mount path, so they still resolve correctly on the destination.

Before vs After

Workflow	Before v1.17.4	After v1.17.4
Find a specific project among 20+	Scroll the flat list, scan names	Type 3 letters in the sidebar search box
Separate work from personal	Lived side by side; mental overhead	Two named groups, one collapsed
Format a long AI prompt before sending	Paste into a markdown editor, format, paste back	Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+F in the overlay
Move your 1DevTool setup to a new laptop	Recreate every project, rebuild groups, reimport themes by hand	Export from old machine, Import on new — preview, relink, restart

Who benefits most

Consultants and freelancers juggling client work — the group-per-client model was the obvious organisation, you just couldn't express it before. Now you can collapse the clients you're not on this week and the sidebar reflects what's actually active.

Anyone running a side-project alongside a day job — putting "Work" and "Personal" in two distinct groups draws a visible line between them, which makes it harder to drift across the boundary by accident.

Developers who switch machines often — desktop, laptop, work loaner, fresh OS reinstall. Export/Import means your sidebar layout, themes, and project list aren't tied to one specific machine anymore.

Try it

Update to v1.17.4 from the in-app updater (or the status-bar update button — also new in this release). Open the sidebar, right-click an empty area in the Projects section, and create your first group. Drop a project into it. Then try the search box: start typing the name of any project — even one inside a collapsed group — and watch the sidebar reorganize itself around what you actually care about right now.

You stop scrolling. You stop hunting. The sidebar starts to feel like yours.