Sessions and Branching

Sessions and Branching

The sidebar lists every Claude Code session it finds under ~/.claude/projects. The right side shows the session you picked, in a real terminal.

The sidebar

From top to bottom:

• Current folder. Its name and full path. A new session starts here unless you pick another folder.
• Search sessions. Filters as you type. A row matches if its name or folder name contains the text, or its session id starts with it.
• Group and sort. Group: Folder or Group: None, and Newest, Oldest or Name. Folder groups sort by their newest session, not alphabetically, unless you sort by name.
• The list, in three sections:

Section	What's in it	Starts
Open	Sessions with a live pane in this window	Expanded
Today	Sessions last active today	Expanded
Earlier	Everything else	Collapsed

Clayo remembers which sections you opened or closed until it quits.

• Limits for your account, above the buttons (see Status Bar and Limits).
• New session, Open, and the gear menu (Settings…, Start at login, Quit Clayo).

What a row shows

• A status light (see below).
• The name. Your own name wins, then the title Claude Code generated (the same text the claude --resume picker shows), then the first prompt, then a placeholder.
• A second line: the status while the session is open, otherwise how long ago it was active ("just now", "12 min ago", "3 h ago", "2 d ago", then a date).
• A ↳ mark and an indent if it is a branch.

Hover a row for its full name, folder, session id, the session it was branched from, and its last prompt.

Status lights

Light	Says	When
Amber	starting / running	The pane just started, or Claude is producing sustained output
Blue	needs you	Claude printed "Do you want to", a permission prompt
Green	done	Output went quiet for 1.5 s after work
Red	api error	Claude printed "API Error:"
Grey	shell closed	The shell in the pane exited

Status comes from the terminal output alone (TerminalPane.Scan and the idle timer in TerminalPane.xaml.cs), not from Claude Code hooks. A needs-you or api-error light stays until output picks up again.

Starting and opening sessions

You do	Clayo runs
New session, pick a folder	claude --session-id <new id> in that folder
Open a closed session	claude --resume <id> in the session's folder
Branch from here	claude --resume <parent id> --fork-session --session-id <new id>

Clayo picks the new id itself, so the row shows up under Open the moment the pane starts, before any transcript exists. Every command also gets --settings '<file>', which adds Clayo's status line relay for that pane only (see Status Bar and Limits).

Each pane starts PowerShell and types the command 400 ms later. When Claude exits you land on a PowerShell prompt in the same pane.

• New session opens "Start a session in": up to 8 recent folders, the current folder first, then Browse for a folder….
• Open lets you pick a file. A new session starts in its folder, and once Claude first settles at its prompt, the file's path is typed in for you, unsent.
• To open a session from the list, double-click it, select it and press Enter, or right-click › Open. A session that is already open is switched to, and a single click on an open row switches to it too.
• If a session's folder no longer exists, it resumes in the current folder instead.

Branching

Branch from here copies the current conversation into a new session. The original is untouched. The branch appears indented under its parent, named "branch of" plus the parent's first 8 id characters until Claude gives it a title.

Two things to know:

• Permissions don't carry over. Anything you allowed "for this session" in the parent has to be allowed again in the branch. That is Claude Code's behaviour.
• Branch links live in Clayo. --fork-session rewrites the session id on every copied line, so nothing in the transcript says where a branch came from. Clayo records the link when you branch, in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Clayo\parents.json (SessionParents.cs). A branch made outside Clayo shows as an ordinary top-level session.

Branches nest up to 8 levels deep. When you sort by Name, a branch keeps its mark and indent but sits wherever its name falls. A branch whose parent transcript is gone shows at the top level.

One session, one pane

Clayo never opens the same session in two panes. Resuming one session id twice interleaves both streams into one transcript, so picking a session that is already open switches to its pane instead. To try two directions, branch.

Attaching files

• Attach files… in the pane header: pick one or more files. Their paths are typed at the prompt, quoted if they contain a space, with a trailing space and no Enter, so you can say what to do with them first.
• Ctrl+V in the terminal does the same for files you copied in Explorer. A text paste is still a normal paste.
• Dropping a file on the island starts a new session with @file typed in. See The Island.

Renaming

Press F2 or right-click › Rename. Enter saves, Esc cancels, clicking away saves. A blank name, or the generated title typed back in, removes your name. Right-click › Reset name does the same. Names are kept in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Clayo\names.json, not in the transcript.

Closing

• ✕ in the pane header ends that session's shell and Claude, and the row drops out of Open into Today.
• Switching panes doesn't stop anything. Every open pane keeps running in the background.
• Closing the window hides it. Sessions keep running. Quit Clayo (gear menu or island menu) ends them all. Clayo does not reopen them on its next start. They're in the list to open again.

Keyboard and mouse

There aren't enough shortcuts for a page of their own, so here they all are.

Where	Key or gesture	Does
Anywhere outside a terminal	Ctrl+,	Open Settings
Settings	Esc	Close Settings
Session list	F2	Rename
Session list	Enter, or double-click	Open
Session list	Right-click	Open, Rename, Reset name
Terminal	Ctrl+C with a selection	Copy (otherwise it interrupts, as usual)
Terminal	Ctrl+V	Paste text, or the paths of files copied in Explorer
Island showing	Esc	Send the island away (the key still reaches the app you're in)
Island	Click	Open Clayo on the session it's about
Island	Right-click	Start at login, Quit Clayo

Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V work the same as Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V in the terminal. Inside a terminal, Esc and Ctrl+, belong to Claude, not to Clayo.