Organize the Streams sidebar

On Zulip, it is useful to organize streams in the sidebar in order to easily access streams which you use frequently. This is because streams are initially arranged alphabetically which makes it difficult to quickly access your frequently used streams.

Furthermore, the Streams sidebar auto-organizes some streams. Inactive streams move down the list whereas active ones get moved up the list.

In order to organize streams, you can use three methods: pinning, searching and muting.

Pinning

Pinning a stream on Zulip pushes the stream to the top of your Streams sidebar and sticks/pins it there so that it stays at the top of your Streams sidebar.

To learn more about pinning a stream, see here.

Searching

If you don't have a stream pinned, you can search for it instead of scrolling through the alphabetically ordered list.

1. On the left sidebar in the Streams section, click on the search () icon in the top right-hand corner.

   You can also use the hotkey "w" to open the search box directly

2. A search box entitled Search streams will appear. You can type the name of a stream into this box and the Streams section will be filtered accordingly.

Muting

If you want to keep a stream on your sidebar but don't want to keep receiving notifications from it, you can mute the stream.

To learn more about muting a stream, see here.

When pinning, searching and muting are combined, you will end up with a well ordered Streams list. All your most important streams will be pinned at the top. All the streams which you search for occasionally will be in the middle. All the inactive streams will be at the bottom of your list. Muted streams will still be in the list but they will be grayed out and you won't receive notifications from them.