Slack Sidebar Sections: How to Organize Channels, Set Them for Everyone, and Fix a Disappearing Sidebar

There's a moment in every Slack workspace's life where the sidebar stops being a list and starts being a wall. Forty channels, a dozen DMs, three apps, and somewhere in there is the one channel you actually needed to open. Slack sidebar sections are the fix: custom, named, collapsible groups that let you put your five real channels at eye level and shove the other thirty-five into a folder you never expand.

This guide covers creating sections, moving channels into them, sorting and collapsing, the sidebar preferences most people never open, how admins set default sidebar sections for everyone on paid plans, and what to do when your Slack sidebar disappeared entirely. Slack moves its UI around more often than it announces it, so where the exact menu item lives may shift — the structure below holds on current Slack.

What Sidebar Sections Actually Are

By default, Slack groups your sidebar for you: Channels, Direct messages, Apps. Those are fixed groupings, not sections you control. Custom sections are groups you name yourself — "Projects," "Fires," "Read Later" — each with its own emoji, its own sort order, and its own collapse state.

One caveat up front: custom sidebar sections are a paid-plan feature. Free workspaces get the default groupings, starred channels, sorting, and muting — but no custom named sections. If "New section" isn't there, that's why, not a bug. We'll cover the free-plan workarounds below.

How to Create a Sidebar Section

The fastest route starts from a channel you already want to file away:

1. Hover the channel in your sidebar and click the ⋮ (more actions) icon, or right-click it.
2. Choose Move to → New section.
3. Name it. Short names win — the sidebar is narrow and long names truncate.
4. Pick an emoji. This is not decoration; the emoji is what your eye actually locks onto when you're scanning at speed.
5. Click Create. The channel lands in the new section, and the section appears in your sidebar.

From then on, moving channels is just Move to → your section name, or drag-and-drop if you're on desktop and feeling dexterous. Dragging works for reordering sections themselves, too — grab the section header and move the whole group up or down.

Two things to know before you build an elaborate structure. Sections are personal — nobody else sees yours. And they're per workspace, so four Slack workspaces means four sidebars to organize.

Sorting, Collapsing, and Unreads

Once a section exists, hover its header and click the ⋮ to reach its options. This is where sections stop being folders and start being a filtering system.

Sort order

Each section sorts independently. Alphabetically suits sections you navigate by name — you build muscle memory for position, and position never changes. Recent activity suits sections you navigate by what's happening. Current Slack also offers a priority-style sort that reorders by what it thinks matters most to you: useful in a big catch-all bucket, slightly unnerving in a small one, because things move when you're not looking. Rule of thumb — alphabetical for small curated sections, recent activity for the pile.

Collapsing

Click a section header to collapse or expand it. This is the whole point of sections. A collapsed section takes one line instead of fifteen, and Slack still shows the unread badge on the header — so you aren't scanning thirty channel names to learn that nothing happened in twenty-nine of them. Most people end up with two or three sections expanded and the rest collapsed permanently.

Show only unreads

In the section options you'll find a display setting for what the section shows: everything, or only conversations with unread messages. Point that at your noisy sections and they effectively vanish until something happens in them. Pair it with the option to hide muted conversations and a forty-channel section becomes a short list that appears only when it has something to say.

Muting is still a per-channel action — right-click a channel → Mute channel. No single switch silences a whole section, so the pattern is: mute the channels individually, then set the section to hide muted conversations.

Sidebar Preferences Worth Opening

Separate from sections, Slack has a sidebar preferences pane that controls the sidebar as a whole: Preferences (Cmd+, on Mac, Ctrl+, on Windows) → Sidebar.

• Show conversations: choose whether the sidebar lists all your conversations or only unread ones. "Unreads only" is a genuinely different way to use Slack — the sidebar becomes an inbox that empties. It's polarizing; try it for a day.
• Always show in sidebar: a list of checkboxes for Threads, Drafts, Sent, Mentions & reactions, Saved items, and similar. Checked items stay pinned at the top no matter what; unchecked ones appear only when they have something in them. Most people want Threads and Mentions always on and the rest on demand.
• Show/hide sections: you can hide default groupings you don't use, which is the cleanest way to stop an empty Apps group from taking up space.

While you're in preferences, the sidebar theme lives one pane over under Appearance — and a distinct color per workspace is the cheapest way to stop posting in the wrong #general.

Setting Sidebar Sections for Everyone

"Can I set sidebar sections for the whole workspace?" is the most common follow-up question, and the answer is a qualified yes. On Business+ and Enterprise Grid plans, owners and admins can define default sidebar sections that new and existing members receive — a starter structure with your channels already sorted into it, configured from the workspace or org settings area under the sidebar/default-channels controls.

Two honest limits. It's a default, not a mandate: members can rename, reorder, and delete your sections afterward, because the sidebar remains a personal view. And it's genuinely not available lower down the plan ladder — no admin setting on Pro or Free pushes sections to other people.

If you're on a plan without it (or on free, without custom sections at all), the workaround is social rather than technical, and it works better than you'd expect:

• Publish a recommended layout. Post the section names and which channels go in each one as a canvas or pinned message, and walk new hires through it during onboarding. People copy a good layout when someone hands them one.
• Use channel name prefixes. #proj-, #team-, #alert-, #social-. Alphabetical sorting then groups them automatically, on every plan, for everyone, with zero setup. This is the single highest-leverage thing a free workspace can do to its sidebar.
• Curate defaults. Set the channels new members auto-join so their day-one sidebar is short and correct instead of long and arbitrary. Our Slack getting-started guide covers what to decide before the first invite goes out.

Help, My Slack Sidebar Disappeared

Nine times in ten the sidebar isn't gone, it's hidden. Work down this list:

1. Toggle it back. Cmd+Shift+D on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+D on Windows and Linux, shows and hides the sidebar. It's easy to hit by accident reaching for other shortcuts, and it's the answer surprisingly often. The same toggle lives in the desktop app's View menu.
2. Widen the window. Slack collapses the sidebar automatically when the window gets narrow. If you've snapped Slack to a third of a monitor or you're on a small laptop, the sidebar is a casualty of layout, not a bug.
3. Check your zoom. Zooming in (Cmd + / Ctrl +) has the same effect as shrinking the window. Cmd+0 / Ctrl+0 resets it.
4. Make sure you didn't just collapse everything. If you see section headers but no channels, your sections are collapsed, not missing. Click the headers.
5. Check "unreads only." If the sidebar preference is set to show unread conversations only and you've read everything, the sidebar is supposed to look nearly empty. This one fools people constantly.
6. Reload, then restart. Cmd+R / Ctrl+R reloads the app; a full quit and relaunch clears more. Update the desktop app while you're there.

In the meantime, Cmd+K / Ctrl+K opens the quick switcher and jumps you to any channel or person by name — no sidebar required. Plenty of heavy Slack users navigate that way permanently; there are a dozen more shortcuts worth the same investment.

A Section Layout That Works

Structures fail when they're too clever. Five sections, maximum, is our recommendation — here's a layout that survives contact with a real week:

• ⚡ Today — three to six channels and DMs you open constantly. Sorted alphabetically so nothing moves. Always expanded. If it grows past six, something gets demoted.
• 👥 Team — your immediate team's channels, standup, and the recognition feed. Expanded.
• 🏗 Projects — active work, sorted by recent activity. Archive ruthlessly; a project section full of finished projects is just a list again.
• 📣 Company — announcements, all-hands, HR. Collapsed, unreads only.
• 🔕 Noise — alerts, deploy bots, social channels, the one you joined for a conference. Muted channels, collapsed, hidden when muted. You'll forget it exists, which is the goal.

One placement to be deliberate about: keep your recognition channel — #props, #wins, #kudos, whatever you call it — pinned at the top of the Team section rather than buried in Company. Recognition only works when people actually see it, and a channel that lives in a collapsed section two scrolls down might as well not exist. That's a sidebar decision with a culture consequence, which is a strange sentence to write but a true one. If you haven't set one up yet, we've written a whole guide to running a recognition channel in Slack.

And if you want that channel to fill itself: Propsly (yes, it's ours) adds peer recognition to Slack — anyone types /props to celebrate a teammate, and every give posts publicly to a feed channel of your choosing. Free for unlimited users, 200 props per person per month, with leaderboards included. It's the kind of channel that earns its spot at the top of your sidebar.

Sections take ten minutes to set up and pay you back daily. Once they're done, go collect a few more Slack tips and tricks — the sidebar is only the first thing most people never configure.