We’re excited to announce the latest release of Lens, which includes a highly anticipated feature designed to help you stay organized and focused while managing multiple clusters: Contextual Tab Filtering. This update builds upon our existing Drill-Into capability of Navigator, ensuring that when you drill into a folder, a cluster, or a specific part of a cluster, only the tabs relevant to that context remain visible. No more juggling a crowded tab bar or trying to remember which resources belong to which cluster—Lens now handles the filtering for you.

Why We Built It

We heard from many users that while they loved Lens’s ability to handle numerous clusters and resources using the tabbed views, the tab bar could easily get cluttered. The drill-into feature of navigator helps to maintain focus on a single cluster but already open tabs from other clusters were still visible, leading to confusion and distraction.

That’s where Contextual Tab Filtering comes in. By tying tab visibility to your current drill-down context, you’ll see only the tabs that belong to the cluster or folder you’re working on. It streamlines your workflow in several key ways:

• Maintain a cleaner UI by showing fewer tabs, reducing visual noise and allowing you to focus on the resources that matter the most at any given time.
• Enables faster task switching—because only the tabs relevant to your current cluster or resource remain visible, you can quickly locate what you need.

How It Works

• Drill-Into Your Focus: Simply click the right-pointing arrow to Drill-Into a cluster or folder. Lens immediately hides all other items in the Navigator, just like before.
• Contextual Tab Filtering: Any open tabs that don’t hierarchically belong to the selected item are hidden, reducing visual clutter and helping you stay on target with your current tasks.
• Zooming Out: When you zoom out from your currently selected item in the Navigator, all hidden tabs reappear exactly as you left them—no need to reopen or refresh anything.

Other Improvements and Tweaks

In addition to Contextual Tab Filtering, this release includes several performance optimizations, UI refinements, and minor bug fixes, including:

• Enabled automatic drill-down in the navigator when searching through clusters, improving readability and organization.
• Added support for pasting Kubeconfigs directly into the Navigator to quickly add clusters.
• Removed automatic persistence of tabs, leaving up to the user when to pin a tab to the view.
• Reintroduced a unified Dock for all tabs associated with a given cluster, improving usability for terminals, shell sessions, logs, and more.
• Enhanced the overall app performance by optimizing the speed when opening tabs, and fixed sluggish behavior during cluster connections and overall navigation.

See the full release notes here.

How to Get Started

Existing Lens users will receive a notification when an update is available—simply click to update and you’ll be on the latest version. New users can download Lens directly from our website. The update to existing users is rolling out in phases, so if you don’t see the update yet and want to try Contextual Tab Filtering right away, you can manually download the latest release from our website.

What’s Next?

We heard from many of you how valuable the Hotbar was for quick access to multiple clusters, and its removal in the new UI/UX at the end of 2024 didn’t go unnoticed. We’ve listened to your feedback and are excited to share that the Hotbar will return in the next Lens update—redesigned to work seamlessly with Contextual Tab Filtering.

Your feedback drives our product forward, so please continue to reach out on our community channels or file an issue if you encounter any bugs. We hope you enjoy this more focused experience, and we look forward to sharing more exciting updates soon!