sessy

A two-pane TUI for browsing, searching, and resuming Claude Code sessions.

Claude Code stores thousands of session files as JSONL — sessy gives you instant search, conversation preview, and one-key resume instead of guessing from timestamps.

Install

If you don't have Rust installed:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Then:

cargo install sessy

Requires Rust 1.86+.

Usage

sessy              # Browse sessions for the current project
sessy --all        # Browse all sessions across all projects
sessy --project X  # Only projects whose name contains X (searches all projects)
sessy --recent 7d  # Only show last 7 days (supports: 1h, 7d, 2w, 1m)
sessy --print      # Pick a session and print its ID to stdout
sessy --purge      # Delete all sessions < 15 KB and older than 2 days
                   # (pinned sessions are kept; combines with --project / --recent)

"The current project" is the enclosing git checkout (or the launch directory outside a repo) and everything below it, so launching from repo/src still finds sessions started at repo/, and a worktree under repo/.worktrees/ counts too.

Scripting: id=$(sessy --print) && claude --resume "$id" — --print exits 1 when you quit without picking.

Sessions are read from ~/.claude/projects/ (or $CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR/projects).

Keybindings

Press ? in the app for the full list.

Session list

Key	Action
j / k or ↑ / ↓	Navigate sessions (wraps around; also Ctrl+N / Ctrl+P)
g / G or Home / End	Jump to first / last
PgUp / PgDn	Page (also Ctrl+U / Ctrl+D)
Enter	Resume with --dangerously-skip-permissions (yolo mode; see enter in Config)
l	Resume with normal permissions
c	Copy a ready-to-run cd <dir> && claude --resume <id> command (stays open)
p	Print session ID to stdout and exit
/	Search (title, name, project, branch, changed files, tickets/PR numbers, full conversation text)
s	Cycle sort: date → size → duration → messages (while searching: relevance → date → …)
1 2 3 4	Filter by size: quick / medium / deep / massive (0 clears)
a	Toggle scope: current project ↔ all projects
b	Pin / unpin (pinned sessions sort to the top)
r	Rename — writes the same entry as Claude Code's /rename, so claude --resume shows it too
o	Open the pull request linked to the session
e	Export session as markdown
d	Delete session (confirm with y)
t	Toggle timeline heatmap view
f	Show files changed in the selected session
T	Toggle tool-use activity in the preview
Tab / →	Focus the preview pane
Esc	Clear the search; with no search, quit
q / Ctrl+C	Quit

Search input

Type to filter; ↑ / ↓ move through the results without leaving the input, Enter moves focus to the list, Esc clears. Pasting works as one edit.

Key	Action
←/→, ⌥←/⌥→, Home/End/⌘←/⌘→	Move the cursor (char / word / line)
⌫, ⌥⌫, ⌘⌫	Delete char / word / to line start (also Ctrl+W, Ctrl+U, Ctrl+K to line end)

Preview pane

Key	Action
j / k or ↑ / ↓	Scroll
PgUp / PgDn / Space	Page (also Ctrl+U / Ctrl+D)
g / G	Top / end of the conversation
/	Search within the conversation; Enter keeps the matches, n / N jump between them
T / f	Tool activity / changed files
Tab / ← / Esc	Back to the list (Esc first clears an active search)

Session List

Each session shows three lines:

▸★ Jun 10 14:32  my-app  feat/auth  Add JWT login endpoint
   1h45m  4.2 MB [medium] · 42 msgs · PR #128  "add login endpoint with JWT"
   └ left off: "looks good, ship it"

• Line 1: Selection/pin indicator, timestamp, project, branch, session name
• Line 2: Duration, file size with color-coded category, message count, linked PR, first message
• Line 3: Last message you sent — where you left off

The session name prefers an explicit /rename value, falling back to Claude Code's AI-generated title or the session slug. Messages count what you typed: slash commands with arguments and messages with pasted images count; tool results, compaction summaries, background-task notifications and messages from other sessions don't.

Size Categories

Tag	Size	Color
[quick]	< 1 MB	Green
[medium]	1 – 10 MB	Yellow
[deep]	10 – 30 MB	Magenta
[massive]	> 30 MB	Red

Timeline

Press t to see a GitHub-style contribution heatmap of your Claude Code activity over the past weeks. Shows total sessions, active days, and peak day.

Preview Pane

Scrollable conversation showing USER: and ASST: messages with their paragraphs and code intact. Claude Code's latest "while you were away" recap, when there is one, is pinned at the top. Sidechain (subagent) entries are filtered out. Loaded in the background with a 10-entry cache. The pane title shows the session's permission mode (plan / accept / yolo), skills it used, and linked PRs; the scroll position is on the right.

• Press T to fold tool-use activity into the preview (TOOL: lines summarising each Edit/Bash/etc. call).
• Press f to list the files the session changed.
• Press / while in the preview pane to search within the conversation. Matching messages are highlighted; Enter commits the search so n/N jump between matches, Esc clears it.

Export

Press e to export the selected session as <name>-<id>.md in the current directory. Includes a metadata header (session ID, project, branch, PRs, duration, size) followed by the conversation.

Config

Optional config at ~/.config/sessy/config.toml (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/sessy/config.toml; the platform config dir, e.g. ~/Library/Application Support/sessy/ on macOS, also works). All keys are optional:

scope = "current"          # "current" (this project) or "all" (every project)
sort = "date"              # date | size | duration | messages
show_tool_activity = false # start with tool-use lines shown in the preview
enter = "yolo"             # "yolo" (--dangerously-skip-permissions) or "safe"

A missing file means defaults; a malformed one also falls back to defaults, with the parse error shown in the status bar at startup. --all and --project override scope.

Performance

• Warm start (cached index): < 100 ms
• Cold start (first run): a couple of seconds for a few thousand files
• Incremental index updates — only changed files are re-scanned; unchanged sessions reuse their cached text
• Parallel scanning with rayon; the preview renders only the rows on screen, so huge sessions stay smooth

How It Works

Reads JSONL session files from ~/.claude/projects/. A single-pass scanner extracts per-session metadata — title, branch, slug, cwd, custom and AI titles, permission mode, skills, changed files, linked PRs, recap, tickets, message count, the "left off" message, and the full conversation text used for search (user + assistant messages, thinking, tool inputs and outputs) — into a cached index (~/.cache/sessy/index.bin), with the searchable text stored in an mmap'd companion (~/.cache/sessy/text.bin). Full conversations are only parsed when you open a preview.

Bookmarks are persisted at ~/.cache/sessy/bookmarks.json.

License

MIT

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Built by agile turtles — see more tools.