I built a global session browser for Claude Code

#ai #opensource #javascript #productivity

If you use Claude Code regularly, you've probably run into this: you start a conversation in one project, then a week later you want to pick it up — but claude --resume only shows sessions for the directory you're currently in.

Switch projects, lose your history. At least, that's how it feels.

The sessions are all there

Turns out Claude Code stores every session centrally in ~/.claude/projects/ — one subdirectory per project, each containing .jsonl files. Nothing is lost. It's just not exposed anywhere useful.

So I built c-trail 🐾 — a CLI tool that reads that directory and gives you a global view of every session, across every project, from anywhere.

What it does

npm install -g c-trail
c-trail

An interactive arrow-key picker opens (or fzf if you have it installed), showing all your sessions sorted by last activity. Navigate with ↑↓, press Enter to resume. That's it.

There's also:

Session preview — see the first few messages before resuming
Full-text search — c-trail --filter "auth middleware" searches across all message text
Stats — message count, token usage, and estimated cost per session
Filters — --project, --recent, --since, --sort
Export — c-trail export <id> --output session.md dumps a full transcript to Markdown
Direct resume — c-trail resume <id> skips the picker entirely

Zero dependencies

The arrow-key picker is built with Node's built-in readline module and ANSI escape codes — no npm dependencies required. fzf integration is optional and automatic if fzf is on your PATH.