Manual

Getting started

Install PrismTabs from the JetBrains Marketplace inside your IDE: Settings → Plugins → Marketplace, search "PrismTabs", click Install, then restart the IDE if prompted.

PrismTabs needs no setup beyond installation. The moment it's enabled you can right-click any open editor tab to start colouring it.

Licensing & the free trial

PrismTabs licensing runs in three stages:

1. Day 0

   Install and start the trial. No card, and no licence key to enter: click Evaluate for free in the IDE's registration dialog, which PrismTabs opens the first time you reach for a Pro feature.

2. Days 1–14

   Everything unlocked. Everyone gets the complete Pro feature set, free, for the first 14 days. Nothing is held back during the trial.

3. Day 15 onward

   Free, or from $14/year. Subscribe to keep the Pro features ($14 a year or $1.40 a month for individuals, $29 a year or $2.90 a month per user for organisations), or carry on indefinitely with the Free tier below.

The split between the two tiers is feature-based, never a cap on how many groups you can make:

The subscription is billed yearly or monthly through the JetBrains Marketplace; paying yearly is the same as getting two months free. See Pricing for the full breakdown.

Assigning a tab to a group

Right-click any editor tab. The first item in the context menu is Tab Group…, which opens the colour swatch popup:

Click a preset dot

The 8 dots sit under a New Group heading, and clicking one starts a new group: you pick the colour here, then name it. The name field is pre-filled with the colour's own label (e.g. "Blue"), so taking the default is a single keystroke. Cancelling the name prompt aborts the whole flow — no group is created and nothing is assigned. Every click makes a fresh group, so clicking the same colour on two different tabs gives you two separate groups; to add a tab to a group you already have, use Add to Group….

Add to Group "<name>"

Appears right under the swatches, with the group's own colour dot, only when a group is marked active and this tab isn't assigned to one yet. One click puts the tab straight in that group, without going through the list below — see Active groups for why this row exists.

Add to Group…

Lists your existing groups, each with its colour dot; pick one to add the tab to it. If moving the tab empties the group it was in, PrismTabs offers to delete that now-empty group.

Manage Groups…

Shown once at least one group exists; opens the rename, recolour, active-group, and delete actions covered in Working with groups.

Remove from Group

Only shown when the tab is currently assigned; clears the assignment and the tint. If that was the group's last member, PrismTabs offers to delete the empty group.

Working with groups

Open Tab Group… on any editor tab, then choose Manage Groups… — it appears as soon as you have at least one group — to pick a group and act on it:

Files…

Lists every file in the group, open tab or not; see What's in a group.

Rename…

Change the group's display name.

Recolour…

Pick a new preset colour; every member tab repaints immediately.

Mark as Active Group Clear Active Group

See Active groups.

Delete Group

Asks for confirmation first, then clears the assignment from every member tab (the files themselves are untouched).

Rename, recolour, delete and marking a group active are also available from the PrismTabs tool window, without going through a tab's context menu — along with hide/show, which only the tool window offers.

What's in a group

A group's members are files, not tabs — closing a tab doesn't take the file out of its group. Two places list them, so a member whose tab is shut is never lost:

Files… Free

In the swatch popup, Manage Groups… → the group → Files…. A titled chooser lists every member by name with its greyed project-relative directory, sorted by path, with type-to-filter search. Click one to open it — if its tab is already open, it's brought to the front.

The tool window tree Pro

Expand a group row to the same list, always on screen; see the tool window.

If a file has been deleted outside the IDE, its row is listed as missing rather than quietly dropped, and choosing it offers to remove it from the group. Files deleted inside the IDE are unassigned automatically.

Active groups Pro

Mark one group active and every file you open afterwards joins it automatically — no assigning each tab by hand. A file that's already in a group stays where it is. The active group is labelled (active) wherever it appears in the popup, and carries a matching · active marker in the tool window. You can mark a group active from either place.

Auto-join only ever sees a file being opened — so a file that's already open when you mark a group active, or one you switch back to by clicking its tab, doesn't join on its own. That's a platform limit, not a bug: IntelliJ raises no event for opening a file that's already open, so there's nothing for PrismTabs to react to. Right-click that tab and the popup carries an Add to Group "<name>" row naming the active group — one click, no need to close and reopen the file, and no subscription needed either: assigning a tab by hand stays free, same as every other manual assignment.

The PrismTabs tool window Pro

Open the PrismTabs stripe on the right-hand edge of the IDE window (or find it under View → Tool Windows → PrismTabs). It's a tree: every group is a row carrying its colour dot, name, member count (3 files, counting members whether or not their tabs are open) and whether it's hidden or active — the active group carries a · active marker, echoing the popup's (active) label. A toolbar and matching right-click context menu offer Active Group, Hide/Show Group, Rename…, Recolour…, and Delete Group for the selected group. Active Group is a toggle — it stays checked while that group is the active one — and marking a group active here or from a tab's popup keeps both views in step. Double-clicking a group row is a shortcut for Hide/Show.

Expand a group and it lists the files it holds, one row each: file-type icon, file name, and the project-relative directory in grey. Members whose tab is currently open are shown in bold, so the closed ones stand out — those are the ones you couldn't otherwise get at. Double-click a file row (or press Enter) to open it, and the usual platform navigation works on the selected row, including F4 and Select in Project View. Typing searches the tree, collapsed groups included.

Right-click a file row for Remove from Group — which is what the tree makes possible: a member whose tab is closed can be dropped without opening it first, something a tab's own right-click menu can't offer. Ctrl-click (⌘-click on macOS) gathers several files, adjacent or not, and one click unassigns them all. If that empties a group, PrismTabs offers to delete it, once for the whole batch.

The tool window is where group management lives by design: it keeps everything a group needs — colour, membership, hidden state, and actions — in one dedicated place, so the editor tab strip stays as it is and just carries the group colours.

The list updates live — a group created from the swatch popup on another tab shows up here immediately, no need to reopen the panel.

Hiding & showing Pro

PrismTabs doesn't collapse a group into an in-strip chip; instead, hiding means "close and remember":

Hide Group

Closes every open tab belonging to the group and records exactly which files were open, in order.

Show Group

Reopens each of those files, in the same order, in the background — your current tab stays active.

Use it to get a crowded group out of the way without losing track of what was open in it — the group stays listed in the tool window (marked "hidden") the whole time, and expanding it still shows every file it holds. A group reads as hidden whenever it has members and none of their tabs is open, however they were closed; an empty group is neither hidden nor shown, so the toggle is greyed out on one.

The palette Pro to edit

PrismTabs ships 8 presets, each with a separate light-theme and dark-theme colour. IntelliJ applies a group colour as a tint over the tab rather than a solid fill, and on an unselected tab it uses roughly half the tint strength it gives the active one — so a colour that only looked right on the active tab would wash out across the rest of the bar. Every preset is picked to stay legible after that lighter blend as well. The 8 presets are free to use as they ship; renaming or repainting them is a Pro feature (see below).

To change a preset's name or colours, open Settings → Tools → PrismTabs. Each row has an editable name field and a colour picker for the light and dark variant. The edited palette is what the New Group swatch row and Recolour… offer from then on; groups you already have keep their own colours until you recolour them. A Restore Defaults link resets everything back to the built-in palette in one step.

This is an IDE-level preference, not a per-project setting — it follows you the same way an editor colour scheme would, across every project you open.

A palette you customised while subscribed keeps being offered if the subscription lapses — the settings page simply greys its fields out. The Free tier loses the ability to edit the palette, not the colours you already saved.

Persistence & renames

Group assignments are stored per-project and survive an IDE restart. They also follow a file through a rename or a move, including files nested inside a renamed or moved directory — you won't lose a tab's colour just because you reorganised your project. The set of tabs a hidden group remembers is stored too, so Show Group still reopens the right files after a restart. (Whether a group reads as hidden isn't stored — it simply means the group has members and none of them is open, so the label can never disagree with the tab strip.)

Deleting a file (or a directory of them) drops the matching assignments rather than leaving a group pointing at something that no longer exists. If that empties a group, PrismTabs offers to delete it — the group itself is never removed without asking.

Compatibility

PrismTabs is built on the IntelliJ Platform rather than on any one product, so it runs in IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, PyCharm, GoLand, PhpStorm, Rider, RubyMine, CLion, DataGrip, Android Studio, and any other IDE built on the same platform, from 2025.1 onward. It's tested against both the classic and the Islands tab painters, in light and dark themes alike.

PrismTabs needs the JetBrains Marketplace Licensing plugin, which checks your trial or subscription. JetBrains IDEs include it already; in an IDE that doesn't, such as Android Studio, the IDE installs it along with PrismTabs. Removing it disables PrismTabs as well.

FAQ