Claude Session Manager

Note: This is an independent, community-built project. It is not developed, maintained, or endorsed by Anthropic or the Claude Code team.

A native desktop app for browsing, monitoring, and managing local Claude Code sessions. Built with Tauri 2 + React + TypeScript.

The app reads ~/.claude/ data read-only, providing a rich browsing experience for conversation history that Claude Code itself does not offer.

Features

Session Browser

• Browse all sessions organized by project, with search and tag filtering
• Full conversation rendering: Markdown (GFM), syntax-highlighted code blocks, diff views, thinking blocks, tool call expansion with output, image display
• Subagent conversations viewable inline (expand Agent tool calls) or via the bottom Subagents panel with locate-to-source navigation
• Pagination with virtual scrolling (react-virtuoso) for smooth performance on long sessions
• Latest messages loaded first, scroll up to load history

Live Session Monitoring

• Real-time dashboard showing all running Claude Code processes (detected via ~/.claude/sessions/{pid}.json)
• PID liveness checking, 10-second polling with ended session retention (5 minutes)
• Click into a live session for real-time conversation streaming (fs-notify on JSONL files, 30s fallback)
• New messages appear automatically with follow-scroll; batched event processing for performance
• Filter live sessions by ID, slug, project name, or PID

Favorites & Tags

• Star sessions, create custom tags with colors, filter by tag
• Cross-project favorited session list

Persistent Backup

• Auto/manual backup to prevent Claude Code's 30-day cleanup
• zstd compression (typically 5-10x ratio)
• Configurable backup directory, interval, and max copies per session
• Backup viewer with message browsing

Settings

• Backup configuration (directory, auto-backup, compression)
• Terminal integration (configurable terminal apps, open project directories)
• Locale settings

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                React Frontend                    │
│  Live Dashboard · Conversation View · Backups    │
│  react-virtuoso · react-markdown · shiki · zustand│
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│              Tauri IPC + Events                   │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                Rust Backend                       │
│  scanner · parser · monitor · backup · commands   │
│                  SQLite                            │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│          ~/.claude/ (read-only)                   │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Backend (Rust)

Module	Purpose
scanner	Discovers projects and sessions from ~/.claude/projects/, incremental re-scan based on file mtime/size
parser	JSONL parsing: message types (user, assistant, system, attachment, image), content blocks (text, thinking, tool_use, tool_result, image), token usage extraction
monitor	Live session monitoring: polls ~/.claude/sessions/*.json, PID liveness via kill(pid, 0), fs-notify JSONL tail for real-time message streaming
backup	zstd compression/decompression, backup scheduling, restore to ~/.claude/
db	SQLite: projects, sessions, favorites, tags, backups, subagents
commands	Tauri IPC command handlers for all frontend operations

Frontend (React + TypeScript)

Area	Components
Layout	Sidebar (navigation, search, live badge), MainContent (view router)
Session	SessionList, SessionCard, ConversationView (virtualized), SessionHeader
Live	LiveDashboard, LiveSessionCard, LiveConversationView (virtualized + streaming)
Message	MessageBubble (memo), ToolCallBlock (with output), ThinkingBlock, DiffView, CodeBlock, ImageFromPath
Backup	BackupManager, BackupConfig
Stores	appStore (navigation), filterStore (tags), liveStore (live sessions)

Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
Desktop framework	Tauri 2
Frontend	React 19, TypeScript 5.8, Vite 7
Styling	Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn/ui
Markdown	react-markdown + remark-gfm
Code highlighting	shiki
Virtual scrolling	react-virtuoso
State management	zustand
Backend	Rust, rusqlite (SQLite), notify 7 (fs events), zstd, chrono
Platform	macOS (primary), Linux/Windows possible via Tauri

Development

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Development (hot-reload frontend + debug Rust backend)
npm run tauri dev

# Production build
npm run tauri build

Output: src-tauri/target/release/bundle/macos/claude-session-manager.app

Core Constraint

The app never writes to ~/.claude/. All application state (favorites, tags, backup records, metadata cache) is stored in its own SQLite database under ~/Library/Application Support/claude-session-manager/.