Slack Tabs Under a Channel Name: What Each One Is and How to Edit Them

The tabs under a Slack channel name are views of that channel. Messages is the conversation, Add canvas opens the channel's canvas, folder tabs such as Bookmarks hold saved links, and Pins and Files & links are there too but hidden until you show them. The + at the end adds a tab. Tabs are shared: Slack's own settings page says they are "the tabs that everyone sees in this channel". On 8 October 2026 we added, renamed, moved, hid and deleted tabs in a free-plan test workspace in Slack web.

What each tab is

Once shown, the Pins tab lists the channel's pinned messages.

Adding a tab

Click + after the last tab. On the Free plan the menu offered Canvas, Link, Folder and Customize tabs. Under "Do more with Pro" it listed List, Workflow and Templates. Clicking Workflow opened a "Select a premium plan to get new workflows" page with Pro and Business+ trials, so those three are paid.

Link does not make a tab of its own. It opened an "Add a bookmark" dialog with a link and a name, and a note: "We'll add this link to a Bookmarks folder for safekeeping." After we clicked Add, a new Bookmarks tab appeared with our link inside. So links always live in a folder tab, and the folder is the tab. Our Slack bookmarks page tests what happens to bookmarks when the folder is deleted.

Renaming, moving, hiding and removing tabs

Open Customize tabs from the + menu, or click the channel name and open the Tabs tab. It lists every tab, including hidden ones. Hover a row to see what you can do with it. The actions were not the same for every tab:

We showed Pins, moved Bookmarks up one place, and renamed it On-call docs in a "Rename tab" dialog. The header changed at once to Messages, On-call docs, Add canvas, Pins. Of the tabs we had, only the folder tab could be renamed. The built-in tabs keep Slack's names; you can only hide or move them.

Tabs in a DM

A DM has tabs too, but fewer choices.

• • In our DM with ourselves the tabs were Messages, Pins, Files & links, and a tab named Deleted file, plus the +. A file we had added as a tab in an earlier test was later deleted, and its tab stayed behind with that label.
• • In the DM with our test app the tabs were Messages and About, with no + button, so you cannot add tabs to a conversation with an app.

What we did not test

The Slack desktop app on our test computer is signed out, so we did not compare these tabs on desktop or mobile. Tab changes are saved on Slack's servers per channel, so they are not a browser setting.

FAQ

Can I add a tab that only I see?

Not in a channel. The Tabs settings page describes the list as the tabs that everyone sees, and we found no per-person option. For a private list of links, use your DM with yourself.

How do I get the Pins tab back?

Click the channel name, open Tabs, hover Pins and click Show tab. It is hidden by default in new channels.