How to Search Your Claude Code Conversation History

Claude Code keeps every session on your machine, but your history is split up — the terminal, the VS Code extension, and the desktop app each keep their own, and every session is scoped to the project folder you ran it in. Each of those apps lets you search and resume its own sessions, so the friction is not that search is missing — it is that no single search spans all three surfaces, let alone the AI chats you have in your browser. This guide covers exactly where your sessions live, how to search them, and the fastest way to search all of them — and your web chats — from one place.

Pick the task you actually have

Why Claude Code history is scattered

Claude Code stores your work as sessions, one per conversation, written to disk as you go. That part is good — nothing is trapped on a server, and your history survives as long as the files do.

The catch is that your history is fragmented. The terminal CLI, the VS Code extension, and the desktop app each keep their own session history, and every session is filed under the project folder you ran it in. Each app gives you tools to search and reopen its own sessions:

• claude --resume (or -r) opens a picker of your saved sessions with a search mode to filter the list — press Ctrl+A to widen it to every project on the machine — and lets you reopen one.
• claude --continue (or -c) jumps straight back into the most recent session in the current directory.
• /resume does the same from inside a running session, and the desktop app lists your sessions in a sidebar you can search.

So each surface can search its own history. What none of them do is pull the terminal, VS Code, and the desktop app into one search — and none of them reach the AI chats you have in your browser. If the session you want is in a different app, or you are not sure which one you used, you are back to checking each place in turn.

Method 1: Resume from the picker

If you can recognise the session in the picker, this is the fastest path:

1. Run claude --resume (or claude --continue to jump straight to the most recent session in the current directory).
2. Filter the list with a search term if you need to.
3. Pick the session and continue it.

Works well for: sessions you can recognise at a glance.

Breaks down when: you are looking for a session by something that was said inside it, rather than by the session itself.

Method 2: Search the session files with ripgrep

Because every session is a plain .jsonl file under ~/.claude/projects, you can search their contents directly. ripgrep (rg) is ideal because it reads nested folders fast:

rg -l "the phrase you remember" ~/.claude/projects

That returns the session files whose text contains your phrase. Add -i for case-insensitive matching, and drop the -l to see the matching lines in context. To find which project a file belongs to, look at its parent folder name — Claude Code names each project folder after the directory you ran it in.

Works well for: a distinctive phrase you are sure appeared in the conversation.

Breaks down when: you are matching against raw JSONL, so results are mixed in with tool calls, file contents, and metadata rather than a clean transcript — and you still have to open the file to read the exchange around your match.

Method 3: Search every session with LLMnesia

Methods 1 and 2 make you either remember the project or wade through raw files. LLMnesia removes both problems: it indexes your Claude Code sessions locally and makes them searchable by keyword from one box — no matter which project or which day they came from.

Point it at your ~/.claude/projects folder once, or install the optional background helper and it keeps your sessions in sync on its own: start a new Claude Code session and it turns up in search without you doing anything. Type a phrase you remember — a function name, an error message, a decision you talked through — and jump straight to that session. From a result you can reopen it in the Claude Desktop app, or copy a ready-to-run terminal command that resumes that exact session in the right project folder.

Because the same index also covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and your other AI tools, one search spans your whole AI history — the web chats and the terminal sessions together. It indexes only your prompts and Claude's replies (not file reads, shell commands, or tool output), and everything stays on your device.

What to remember

Claude Code's own search stops at the edge of each app — the terminal, VS Code, and the desktop app each search only their own sessions, and none of them see your web chats. For a session you can place in one app's picker, that is all you need. To search across every surface at once — or to match a session by a phrase from it alongside your ChatGPT and Claude web chats — you need one index over all of it: ripgrep over ~/.claude/projects when you know the exact phrase and the project, or a tool like LLMnesia when you don't.