I had 1,063 Claude Code conversations and couldn't find anything — so I built claude-grep

coolcorexix — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:24:13 +0000

I use Claude Code a lot. Enough that when I finally counted, I had 1,063 conversations sitting in ~/.claude/projects/ — around 256 MB of JSONL transcripts.

And I could never find the one I needed.

You know the feeling: "I definitely solved this exact bug a few weeks ago… in some conversation… somewhere." But Claude Code's built-in --resume picker only matches on a session's title (its first prompt). It has no idea what was actually said inside. So the conversation where I'd figured out the gnarly thing was, in practice, gone.

So I built claude-grep: live search across your entire Claude Code history, with one keypress to jump back into any conversation.

What it does

You type, and results stream in as you go. Each row shows the matched snippet with your phrase highlighted, the conversation's working directory, and when it happened. Hit Enter and it cds into that project and runs claude --resume on the right session — you're back exactly where you left off.

Under the hood it's deliberately boring and fast:

ripgrep does the first pass, narrowing 1,000+ transcripts to candidates in milliseconds.
A small Python layer parses only those candidates to pull clean, highlighted snippets out of the JSONL.
fzf drives the UI using the --disabled + change:reload trick — fzf re-runs the search on every keystroke instead of fuzzy-filtering what's already on screen.

No index to build, nothing running in the background. It just reads the files Claude Code already writes.

The bug that nearly killed it: sub-agents

When I first wired up "press Enter to resume," a bunch of conversations simply wouldn't open.

It turns out 940 of my 1,063 transcript files were sub-agent sessions — the side conversations Claude Code spawns to handle sub-tasks. They live here:

~/.claude/projects/<project>/<PARENT-UUID>/subagents/agent-*.jsonl

…and they are not resumable on their own. claude --resume agent-abc123 does nothing.

But the path gives it away: the parent session's UUID is literally the directory name above subagents/. (It's also stored in the file's sessionId field, alongside isSidechain: true.) So when a match lands inside a sub-agent transcript, claude-grep resolves it to the parent and resumes that — using the parent's working directory, so it even survives sub-agents that ran in a since-deleted git worktree.

def resumable_session(path):
    parent_dir = os.path.dirname(path)
    if os.path.basename(parent_dir) == "subagents":
        # sub-agent transcript → resume the parent session instead
        return os.path.basename(os.path.dirname(parent_dir)), True
    base = os.path.basename(path)
    return (base[:-6] if base.endswith(".jsonl") else base), False

Results then get de-duplicated by resumable session, so you never see two rows that open the same conversation.

Try it

You'll need fzf, ripgrep, Python 3, and the claude CLI on your PATH.

git clone https://github.com/coolcorexix/claude-grep.git
ln -sf "$PWD/claude-grep/ccfind" ~/.local/bin/ccfind   # ~/.local/bin must be on PATH
ccfind

It's MIT-licensed and a single Python script — read it, fork it, rip out the parts you like.

👉 github.com/coolcorexix/claude-grep

If you live in Claude Code as much as I do, I'd love to hear what you search for first — and if you hit a transcript shape it chokes on, open an issue. There are a lot of edge cases hiding in those JSONL files.

Benefits of mouse-less habit

coolcorexix — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 09:36:47 +0000

Dashing through your keyboard from start to end of a task is no easy yet worth practicing skill for developers with several pluses that I figured out myself:

Zone in with your keyboard:
Using just the keyboard once you are used to it is both comfortable and stylish. Especially in the case of using mech keyboard, I am sure there is no better way to flex on a top keyboard than to do everything with it: browsing web, coding and formatting report, you tell me. After all, it made the developer feel distinguished among other jobs in the way we use computer.
Less eye movement , less redundant action
The eyes will immediately focus on where your action happen instead of tracking the mouse cursor from point A to point B. You also need to think on what you need to do next more mindfully rather than just move the mouse around mindlessly.
From “Do-Think-Redo” to “Think-Do-Rethink”
Whenever holding a mouse, it is normal that we move them around for a while before we know what to click next, and sometimes you just click where it is convenient not where necessary, and then after the click we move the cursor some more to figure out what to do next of next. This habit accumulatively cost us a lots of time between each action if ‘make the mouse move’ is the default first action — an action that is muscle-memorized, making you act as reflex rather than being rational. With only just the keyboard, you will have to think on what you want to do next before you press because it is not just a left/right mouse click — it has to be the exact shortcut you want to use or the location and name of the file your want to navigate to. Working with keyboard require you to get familiar with your IDE, file naming and folder structure, resorting more of brain-memory resource so that the action afterward can be effective and precise. And as an unexpected result, it will also improve your flow with mouse because you already reengineer to your “Do-Think-Redo” to “Think-Do-Rethink’.

Final words:

Mouse-less habit might be counterintuitive when you first start adopting but when you can apply, even just partially, on your daily lives the experience is very rewarding — just like the keyboard is your new extended/ optimized just for using computer arm.

Bonus:

Try out this plugin to use your browser more with keyboard here, I mean.. just keyboarding everything, seriously muahahaha