chat-browser

Browse, search, and analyze your CLI chat sessions from Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, and OpenAI Codex CLI.

What it does

chat-browser indexes your local AI chat sessions into a SQLite database and serves a React web app to explore them. Sessions are auto-detected from their default locations and kept up-to-date via a file watcher.

Supported tools:

• Claude Code — ~/.claude/projects/
• GitHub Copilot CLI — ~/.copilot/session-state/
• OpenAI Codex CLI — ~/.codex/sessions/ and ~/.codex/archived_sessions/

Features:

• Full-text search across all messages (FTS5 with porter stemming)
• Filter by tool, project, branch, date range, and role
• Filters persist in the URL — back navigation restores your exact state
• Sessions sorted by most recent activity
• Subagent sessions excluded by default (Claude Code only), toggleable
• Session detail view with collapsed non-text message groups (tool calls, tool results, thinking)
• Expand/collapse all groups with one click
• Markdown rendered in message bubbles when detected
• Tool call inputs shown as expandable JSON tags
• Analytics dashboard (sessions over time, tool breakdown, project breakdown, token estimates)
• Export sessions as Markdown or JSON
• Live re-indexing as new sessions are written

Requirements

• Node.js 22+

Usage

npx chat-browser

Options:

--port <number>      Port to listen on (default: 3000)
--open               Open browser automatically
--reindex            Drop and rebuild the index on start
--data-dir <path>    Path to JSON config with custom session directories

Development

npm install

# Start the dev server (API + file watcher)
npm run dev:server

# Start the Vite dev server (UI with HMR)
npm run dev:client

# Build everything
npm run build

# Run tests
npm test

Data

The index is stored at ~/.chat-browser/index.db (SQLite). It is rebuilt automatically when session files change. To force a full rebuild:

npx chat-browser --reindex

Architecture

src/
  server/
    api/          Express route handlers (sessions, search, analytics, export)
    db/           SQLite schema and connection (node:sqlite)
    services/
      parsers/    Per-tool JSONL parsers (claude, copilot, codex)
      indexer.ts  Batch indexer + chokidar file watcher
      discovery.ts  Auto-detect session directories
  client/
    pages/        Search, SessionDetail, Analytics
    components/   MessageBubble, FilterBar, SessionCard, ToolCallItem, ...
    hooks/        useSessions, useSearch

Each parser reads the tool's native JSONL format and produces a normalized ParsedSession with typed messages (text, tool_use, tool_result, thinking) and tool call inputs stored as JSON.