How to view your Claude Code session history

Claude Code keeps a complete record of every conversation on your machine — but it's buried in raw log files. Here's where that history lives, and the fastest way to actually read it.

Where Claude Code stores sessions

The Claude Code CLI writes each session to a .jsonl file (one JSON object per line) under your home directory, organized by project:

~/.claude/projects/
  └─ <encoded-project-path>/
       ├─ <session-id>.jsonl
       └─ <session-id>.jsonl

Each line records one event in the conversation — your prompts, Claude's replies, tool calls (file reads, edits, shell commands), results, and extended thinking. It's a faithful, complete transcript. It is also, in raw form, almost unreadable.

Why the raw files are hard to read

• Everything is on one line of escaped JSON per event — no formatting, no syntax highlighting.
• Tool calls and their results are interleaved with raw parameters and large payloads.
• Project folders are path-encoded, so finding the right session by eye is tedious.
• There is no search across sessions, and no quick way to see which project a run belongs to.

You can cat a file or pipe it through a JSON formatter, but that quickly breaks down for real sessions with hundreds of events.

The easy way: browse it in Sessionly

Sessionly is a free, native desktop app that reads those same files directly from ~/.claude and turns them into a clean, browsable archive. Nothing is uploaded — it reads your files locally, with no database and no account.

1. 1

   Install Sessionly

   Download the build for your platform (macOS, Windows, or Linux) and open it.

2. 2

   It finds your sessions automatically

   Sessionly reads ~/.claude/projects on launch and groups every session by project and date.

3. 3

   Open any conversation

   Read the full transcript with syntax-highlighted code, expandable tool calls, extended thinking blocks, and subagent conversations.

4. 4

   Search and export

   Search full-text across every conversation, then export any session to Markdown to share or archive.