Spaces and profiles: keep work and personal logins apart

Two Gmail accounts, no signing out

You have a work Google account and a personal one. In one browser profile you juggle them: the account switcher, the wrong calendar, a doc shared to the wrong address.

In Rio you give each its own space on its own profile. Work is signed in to the work account, with Linear, Figma and the team's Notion pinned. Home is signed in to the personal account, with your bank and your photos. Swipe two fingers across the trackpad and you go from one to the other. Neither space can see the other's cookies, because they live in separate profiles.

Space and profile, the difference

• A space is a sidebar: its own pinned tabs, folders, Today tabs, an icon and up to three theme colors. It is how you split your day.
• A profile is what sits behind the sidebar. Rio's profile editor puts it plainly: each profile keeps its own logins, cookies, history and extensions, and spaces on the same profile share them.

So you can have several spaces on one profile, say Work, Launch and Hiring all signed in to your work accounts, and a separate profile for everything personal. Spaces on the same profile also share favorites.

Setting it up

1. Choose Spaces, New Space in the menu bar, or type new space in the command bar.
2. In Create a Space, name it and pick an icon: a symbol, an emoji or a letter.
3. Open the profile menu and pick a profile, or choose New profile and name it, for example Personal.
4. Pick the space's theme colors and create it.

To move a space you already have, choose Spaces, Edit Space. The editor has the same profile menu, along with the name, icon and colors. Spaces, New Profile makes a profile on its own.

What each profile keeps

Open Settings, Profiles and pick a profile. Alongside its name and how many spaces use it, each profile has:

• Its own search engine: Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Brave Search or Ecosia.
• Its own archive time: how long Today tabs stay before Rio archives them, from 12 hours up to 30 days.
• Its own download location.
• Your Data and Settings, which opens that profile's passwords and other data, and Clear browsing data.

Extensions are per profile too, so a work-only extension stays in your work spaces.

Switching

• Swipe with two fingers. Since build 1446 each swipe switches one space, one after another, without moving the pointer between them. Between spaces of the same profile, the favorites stay still while the rest slides.
• Click a space's icon in the bar at the bottom of the sidebar.
• Press Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9 to jump to a space, or Cmd+Option+Right and Cmd+Option+Left for the next and previous one.
• Open the Library with Cmd+Shift+L and pick Spaces to see every space side by side.

The whole window takes the space's colors when you switch, so you can tell Work from Home without reading anything.

For a one-off

Some sessions shouldn't touch any profile: checking a site signed out, or logging in on someone else's account for a minute. Cmd+Shift+N opens a private window for that.

Coming from Arc

Rio's Arc import always brings your spaces and your profiles. If your Arc spaces used different profiles, they land on matching Rio profiles with their logins, so the work and personal split you had in Arc is there on the first launch.

• Spaces in Rio
• Moving your Arc passwords and sign-ins to Rio
• Vertical tabs on Mac: how Rio's sidebar works

Download Rio for Mac