Sidebar

What's in the Sidebar#

The sidebar is the left-edge column where you navigate from. Think of it as your home base — every folder, drive, server, and saved view you use regularly lives there. It's organized into sections you can show, hide, reorder, or collapse. Click anything in it to navigate the active pane to that destination.

The Seven Sections#

• Workspaces — your saved layouts. See Workspaces.
• Favorites — built-in shortcuts (Recents, Applications, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Movies, Music, Pictures, Home) plus anything you've dragged in yourself. You choose which built-ins to show in Settings.
• iCloud — iCloud Drive and the Shared folder, when present.
• Locations — every drive currently mounted: your internal disk, external drives, USB sticks, mounted disk images. Plus computers discovered on your local network via Bonjour, if enabled.
• Servers — your saved remote connections (SFTP, FTP, WebDAV, SMB, S3). A small green dot means connected, gray means not. See Remote & Sync.
• Smart Folders — Duplicates, Large Files, App Cleaner, Recents, Untagged Items. See SmartFolder.
• Tags — every macOS tag you've marked as visible. Click a tag to find every file that has it.

Customizing What's Shown#

Open Settings ▸ Sidebar to choose which built-in items appear. By default Seiz shows the basics (Recents, Applications, Desktop, Documents, Downloads) and hides the more specialized ones (Movies, Music, Pictures, Home) — turn anything on or off based on what you actually use.

For drives, you can independently choose whether to show internal disks, external disks, and removable media. Most people want external and removable visible but the internal Macintosh HD hidden — there's rarely a reason to navigate to / through the sidebar.

Reordering Sections and Items#

Drag any sidebar item to a new position within its section. The order is saved. Drag a section header (the all-caps label like “FAVORITES”) to reorder whole sections — useful if you want Workspaces below Favorites instead of above, or Tags pinned to the top.

Click a section header to collapse or expand it. Collapsed sections are remembered between sessions, so the noise stays hidden.

Adding Custom Favorites#

Drag any folder, tag, smart folder, server, or workspace into the Favorites section to pin it there. Right-click to remove. Custom favorites are reorderable like everything else and survive across app updates.

Mounting and Ejecting#

Mounted drives appear automatically in Locations as soon as macOS sees them — plug in a USB stick and it's there immediately. Each ejectable drive has a small eject icon on its row; click it to safely unmount. If you were browsing a drive when you ejected it, Seiz redirects all open panes to your home folder so they don't end up showing dead paths.

Local Network Discovery#

Computers on your local network that share files (via SMB or AFP) appear automatically in Locations under their hostname. Click one to open a file-sharing connection through macOS — useful for quickly grabbing a file off another Mac in the house without setting up a permanent server connection. Turn this off in Settings if you find it noisy on a big network.

The Active Highlight#

Whatever folder, server, or smart folder the active pane is showing gets highlighted in the sidebar so you can always tell where you are. The highlight follows you as you navigate — switch panes, switch tabs, click around — the sidebar stays in sync.

Next Steps#

• Workspaces — save and restore complete window layouts.
• SmartFolder — what the Duplicates / Large Files / App Cleaner items in the sidebar actually do.
• Remote & Sync — adding servers to the Servers section.