claude-resume

A fast, interactive terminal session browser for Claude Code. Browse, search, fork, and checkpoint any of your past sessions across all projects — with live filtering, BM25 full-text deep search, and message previews.

Why?

Claude Code's built-in /resume is limited to the current project, /checkpoint can't go earlier than summarized context, and /fork UX is clunky. claude-resume gives you all sessions across all projects with powerful search, session forking, and full checkpoint control over your conversation history.

Install

pnpm install
pnpm build
pnpm link --global

Usage

claude-resume          # resumes with `claude`
claude-remote-resume   # resumes with `claude-remote`

Controls

Key	Action
Type anything	Live filter by summary, project, branch
Up / Down	Navigate sessions
Enter	Resume selected session, or deep search when in search bar
Right	Open action menu (Fork / Checkpoint) on selected session
f	Fork (duplicate) the selected session
c	Checkpoint — roll back to any conversation turn
Backspace	Delete search characters
Esc	Clear search / cancel action / quit

Search

• Live filtering: Just start typing — sessions are filtered instantly by summary, first prompt, project name, path, and git branch. Multi-word queries highlight each term independently.
• Deep search (Enter in search bar): Performs a full BM25 search through the actual conversation content of all your .jsonl files. Results stream in ranked by relevance with recency boost, and show relevance bars and match snippets in the preview pane.

Fork & Checkpoint

• Fork (f or Right → Fork): Duplicates the session .jsonl file with a new UUID. The forked session appears immediately in the list. Useful for branching a conversation without losing the original.
• Checkpoint (c or Right → Checkpoint): Shows every conversation turn in a scrollable list. Select a turn and confirm to truncate the session to that point. The original file is backed up to .jsonl.bkp before truncation. Unlike Claude's built-in /checkpoint, this works on any turn — even ones before summarized context.

Both actions are available in browse mode and deep search mode, and require confirmation before executing.

How it works

1. Reads sessions-index.json files from ~/.claude/projects/ for instant metadata, and scans .jsonl files directly to catch sessions not yet indexed
2. Uses actual file modification times (fs.stat) instead of stale index timestamps
3. Merges and deduplicates sessions from all projects, sorted by most recently modified
4. Preview pane reads the last 8KB of conversation files for quick message previews
5. Deep search streams through .jsonl files newest-first, scoring with BM25 (k1=1.2, b=0.4) plus a recency boost, with prefix matching for partial terms
6. Uses alternate screen buffer (like vim/fzf) for clean fullscreen rendering
7. Launches claude --resume <sessionId> via your shell ($SHELL -ic) so aliases are inherited

Development

pnpm dev          # Run directly with tsx
pnpm test         # Run tests
pnpm test:watch   # Run tests in watch mode
pnpm build        # Compile TypeScript to dist/

License

MIT