Session Management

Source: src/history.ts (464 lines)

Overview

Claude Code maintains session history to enable resuming conversations, exporting transcripts, and managing multiple sessions.

Session Storage

Sessions are stored locally and include:

Conversation messages (user, assistant, system)
Tool call history and results
Timestamps and metadata
Token usage statistics

Resume

Resume a previous session:


claude --resume

This restores the full conversation context, including tool results and AI state.

Session Commands

Command	Description
`/session`	Session management utilities
`/resume`	Resume a specific session
`/clear`	Start a fresh session
`/compact`	Compress current session context

Context Compaction

The /compact command compresses the conversation history to free up context window space while preserving essential information. This is useful for long sessions that approach the context limit.

Export

Sessions can be exported for sharing or archival purposes. The export includes the full conversation transcript with tool interactions.

History Management

src/history.ts provides APIs for:

Listing available sessions
Loading a specific session
Saving current session state
Pruning old sessions
Searching session history