Source Groups

A Source Group is a sidebar folder that holds related Sources (Local Systems, SSH Servers, GCP/Firebase Projects). Groups are purely organizational - they don't change how Sources work, what permissions they need, or what credentials they use. The point is to keep your sidebar organized when you have more than a handful of Sources - and to let you attach a whole group to a Monitor or a Merged Layout in one drop.

Why use them

The sidebar is your control surface for the whole app. With five Sources it's easy to scan; with twenty-five it isn't. A few patterns that work well:

By environment. Production, Staging, Development as three groups, with the matching servers under each. Easy to mute "noisy dev hosts" by collapsing one group.
By role. Web servers, API servers, Workers, Databases. Useful when an incident is about a specific tier and you want a clean view of just that tier.
By project / customer. One group per project name - especially useful for consultants, agencies, or anyone running infrastructure for multiple parties.
By datacenter / region. us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1 as groups. Cuts down the visual noise when you're only troubleshooting one region.

You can mix patterns freely. The grouping is a sidebar affordance, not a database constraint.

Creating a Source Group

Three ways:

File ▸ New Source Group…
Right-click an empty area in the sidebar ▸ New Source Group…
The dedicated group-creation button at the bottom of the sidebar.

All three open the same sheet. The "+" entries above are disabled until at least one Source exists - empty groups don't have anything to hold yet.

The editor sheet asks for:

Icon - any SF Symbol. Defaults to the folder glyph (folder); click the icon button to pick a different one.
Name - what you'll see at the group's header in the sidebar.

Renaming a Source Group

Two ways:

Right-click the group header ▸ Edit Source Group… - reopens the same editor sheet (where you can change name or icon).
Select the group's row and press Return - inline rename in the sidebar.

Renames are undoable. ⌘Z rolls a rename back; ⌘⇧Z re-applies it.

Moving Sources into / out of a group

Drag and drop. Drag a Source from anywhere in the sidebar onto a Source Group's header - the Source slides into that group. Drag it back out (onto the section header outside any group, or onto a different group's header) to relocate.
Right-click on a Source ▸ Move to Group… - pick a destination from the submenu. The submenu lists every existing Source Group plus None to ungroup.

Moves are undoable like renames.

Deleting a Source Group

Right-click the group header ▸ Delete Source Group.

What happens to the Sources inside it:

The Sources are NOT deleted. They keep all their configuration (host, user, credentials, streams). Only their group assignment is cleared.
They re-appear ungrouped in the sidebar. You can drag them back into a different group, or leave them ungrouped.

The deletion is undoable. ⌘Z brings the group back with every Source that was in it at the moment of delete reconnected to it.

What you can do with a Source Group

A Source Group isn't just a sidebar folder - it's also a draggable handle for "every Source in here." You can drop a Source Group onto:

A Merged Layout's drop bar. The merged view expands the group into every Stream from every Source in it, interleaved by arrival time with color-coded line prefixes per Stream. Useful for "show me everything from Production while I track this incident."
A Monitor's source drop bar. The Monitor watches every Stream from every Source in the group against its pattern list. Useful for cross-cutting alarms ("panic anywhere in Production").

The relationship is live: if you add a new Source to the group later, its Streams automatically join any Merged Layout or Monitor the group is already attached to. No need to re-drop.

Regular multi-pane Layout slots (the non-merged kind) expect a single Stream per pane and don't accept Source Groups directly - drop individual Streams there instead.

Streams under grouped Sources

Streams hang off Sources, not groups. Moving a Source to a different group doesn't change anything about its Streams - they continue tailing exactly as before.

The sidebar nests Streams under their Source, and Sources under their group, so a Stream's visual path is Group → Source → Stream. Collapsing a Source Group collapses everything under it in one click - useful for muting visual noise without stopping the tails (tails keep running in the background regardless of sidebar expansion state).

Save / Restore Configuration

Source Groups are included in File ▸ 'Save Configuration…' and File ▸ 'Restore Configuration…': a group's name, icon and member Sources all come back. Restore on another Mac and your sidebar is arranged exactly as you left it.

LogRaker has the same grouping affordance for two other sidebar sections:

Layout Groups - bucket your saved multi-pane Layouts. See Layouts.
Monitor Groups - bucket your Monitors. See Monitors.

All three are unrelated to each other - a Source Group doesn't constrain which Layouts can use Sources from inside it, etc. They're three independent sidebar-organization tools.

The Ungrouped row

Whatever you have not filed into a group stays under Ungrouped, in the Sources, Layouts and Monitors sections alike. Select that row for the same overview a group gets: its count, and a table of the items sitting loose.