Tabs and folders

Pin, group and archive tabs in the sidebar, organize them into folders, lock a folder, and choose how long unused tabs stay open in Lilo.

This page shows how to keep the tabs you use, let the others go on their own, group tabs in folders and lock a folder behind a password.

How the sidebar is laid out

Each Space has three kinds of tabs, top to bottom:

• Favorites, the tiles at the top. Bookmark Tab in a tab’s right-click menu, or Tab > Bookmark This Page, puts a tab there.
• Pinned tabs, under the tiles. They stay until you remove them.
• Open tabs, the rest of the list. These are the tabs Lilo archives once you leave them alone.

Favorites and pinned tabs keep the page you saved them on as their home page. Closing one unloads it but keeps it in the sidebar; clicking it opens that page again. When you have browsed away, its right-click menu offers Back to Home Page, and Edit… changes its name or address.

Keep a tab for good

• Right-click the tab and choose Pin Tab, or use Tab > Pin Tab for the current tab.
• Or drag the tab up into the pinned tabs.

To remove a pinned tab, right-click it and choose Unpin Tab, or close it and choose Remove Pinned Tab.

A link to another site opens in a Peek over a pinned tab or a favorite, so the tab stays on its own site.

Stop tabs piling up

Lilo archives an open tab you have not looked at for 12 hours. Archiving closes the tab and keeps its address and title in the Space’s archive, where you can reopen it.

What Lilo never archives:

• pinned tabs, favorites and tabs inside folders;
• the tab on screen and the Space’s selected tab;
• a tab playing sound, in a call, in Picture in Picture, holding text you typed and have not sent, or controlled by an AI agent;
• terminal tabs.

Lilo checks every five minutes while it is the active app. The archive keeps tabs for 30 days, up to 200 per Space. A Private Space’s archive is never written to disk.

When you open Lilo again after it was closed for longer than a Space’s delay, that Space opens with no tab selected and its pinned and bookmarked tabs back on their home pages. This happens at launch only, not when you come back to a Lilo that kept running, and only after you quit Lilo: when it closed unexpectedly the last time, the time away is not counted. Settings > Tabs and Spaces > Open to an empty window does this at every launch.

Choose how quickly idle tabs sleep

Separately from archiving, Lilo pauses tabs you are not using so they cost no energy, and empties them when you have more loaded tabs than it keeps or memory runs short. A paused tab shows its page again when you select it; an emptied one reloads.

Set the pace in Settings > Tabs and Spaces > Idle tabs:

With every choice, Lilo also empties the tabs you used least once there are more loaded tabs than it keeps (up to 24 in the current Space, depending on your Mac’s memory, and a few in other Spaces), and more of them when memory runs low. Energy use gives the numbers. On battery power, every choice pauses background tabs after one minute. A tab playing sound or in a call is not paused, a tab holding unsaved text is never emptied, and Save Memory does not empty pinned tabs for idleness.

Group tabs in folders

• Right-click a folder and choose New Folder to nest one inside it. Folders nest up to five levels.
• Open Folder and Close Folder show or hide its tabs.
• Delete Folder deletes the folder with its tabs and subfolders, after you confirm. It cannot be undone.
• A folder in the pinned tabs pins what you move into it. Tabs in folders are never archived.
• Extensions see folders as Chrome tab groups.

Stack and sort the open tabs

Click Sort and Group on the divider above your open tabs, or right-click an empty part of the sidebar:

• Stack Tabs by Site (on by default) folds three or more open tabs of one site into one row, which stays until one tab is left. Right-click a stack for Move Stack to New Folder, Move Stack to Space, Don’t Stack that site, or Close Stack. Never Stack lists the sites you excluded.
• Group by Type puts agent and terminal tabs in trays of their own, above the web pages. Group by Project gives each project that two or more tabs belong to a tray.
• Sort by Site and Sort by Title order the open tabs once; folders keep their places.

Lock a folder

A locked folder stays closed, and its tabs are hidden from the sidebar and from the command bar’s results until you unlock it.

An unlocked folder locks again after 15 minutes without activity, and whenever the screen locks, the Mac sleeps or you switch user. Change the delay to 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes in Settings > Privacy > Lock folders after. While a locked folder is open, its row shows Lock now.

To change or drop the password, right-click the unlocked folder and choose Change Password… or Remove Lock; macOS asks for your Mac password or Touch ID first.

Lilo stores only a salted hash of the password, in your Mac’s Keychain, for this Mac only.

Move between tabs from the keyboard

⌃⇥ walks your most recent tabs, from every Space, until you release Control. To make it follow the sidebar order instead, change Control-Tab switches tabs in in Settings > General > Keyboard shortcuts. Every shortcut is listed in Keyboard shortcuts.

Put the tabs on another edge

Drag the sidebar to another edge of the window, choose View > Move Tabs to the Left, Right, Top or Bottom, or set Tabs in Settings > Appearance.