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1.9 Journal and History
Version: 1.0.0-rc.4 Last updated: 2026-07-20
ClioDeck keeps a full record of your work with the AI assistant, so you can find your way back to past enquiries and follow your own progress.
- Research journal: your work sessions
- Conversation history: past exchanges with the assistant, viewable but not resumable
- Session timeline: an event-by-event view within a single session
- AI proposals (RC3): every accept, reject or edit is recorded, along with the chapter it happened in
ClioDeck keeps two journals, deliberately separated:
| Journal | Contents | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
Research journal (brain.db) |
Full exchanges: questions, answers, sources, proposal texts | Finding and citing your own method |
AI usage journal (journal.db) |
Facts without content: which model, when, how many tokens, which decisions | Accounting for your use of AI — without ever exposing your text |
The usage journal contains no prompt, no excerpt and no file path. That
is a design guarantee, not a setting. Open it with Ctrl/Cmd+J.
- Open your project
- Click the Journal icon in the sidebar (book icon)
The journal is organised by work sessions:
Session (2026-07-20 14:30)
├── Conversation 1
│ ├── Your question
│ └── Assistant's answer (with sources)
├── Conversation 2
└── …
Simplified for the common case — a session can also hold document edits, PDF operations, and proposal decisions alongside conversations, all folded into the "Total events" count below.
| Item | Description |
|---|---|
| Date and time | When the session took place |
| Duration | Time spent in the session |
| Total events | A generic event count — AI operations, document edits, proposal decisions, and PDF operations all increment it, not just question/answer exchanges |
- Empty sessions: hide sessions without activity
That's the only filter currently wired up — there is no date-range filter, and a keyword search field exists in the store but isn't connected to any component yet.
This isn't a separate feature from the research journal above — it's the same data, viewed at the level of individual exchanges rather than sessions. There is no separate "History" icon in the chat panel; browse exchanges from inside the Journal panel itself.
- Conversation list: newest first
- Preview: the opening words of each exchange
- Selection: click to see the detail
| Item | Description |
|---|---|
| Question | Your original message |
| Answer | The assistant's reply |
| Sources | Documents used for retrieval |
| Timestamp | Exact date and time |
Within a single session, its events are shown as a plain vertical list — each one a dot and a connector line, with a type label and timestamp. There is no calendar or heatmap view across days or months: no hover-for-detail, no click-to-filter-by-day, no week/month/year zoom. Browsing across sessions means picking a different session from the session list, not navigating a timeline.
You can open and read any past exchange from the Journal panel, but
there is no "resume" feature — no action reloads a past conversation's
context into an active chat session. Confirmed: ChatHistoryView.tsx is a
pure read-only renderer with no click handler or state mutation. It's a
record to consult, not a conversation you can pick back up.
Everything is stored inside the project folder:
{project}/.cliodeck/
├── brain.db # research journal, history and vector stores
└── journal.db # AI usage journal (separate by design)
Both are SQLite databases. The two files are separate on purpose: the usage journal must be shareable — for a report, a funder, an ethics statement — without carrying any of your text with it.
Fixed in RC4. Until then, both journals could record an event against the wrong project after a project switch: every write site re-fetched the current history manager rather than the one for the project the event belonged to, so an entry arriving after a switch landed in the new project's
brain.dbandjournal.db. The context is now captured when the event is created, not when it is written.
| Volume | Space |
|---|---|
| 100 conversations | ~1 MB |
| 1 000 conversations | ~10 MB |
| 10 000 conversations | ~100 MB |
Since RC4 the research journal can be purged. The action asks twice: the first confirmation lists exactly what disappears (sessions, events, AI operations, chat history), the second reminds you that it is irreversible and that un-exported reports go with it. It reports how many sessions were removed.
Deleting a single session is still not possible.
Do not confuse this with Settings → Actions → "Purge database", which
despite the name wipes your PDF vector index — all embeddings, chunks,
HNSW and BM25 indexes — and would force you to reindex every PDF. That one
does not touch journal.db or your conversation history.
The AI usage journal can be exported (Markdown, JSONL, CSV) with the
cliodeck-journal export --format md|jsonl|csv command. Ctrl/Cmd+J opens
the usage journal window for viewing, but that window has no export button
today — exporting is CLI-only.
- Thematic sessions: group your enquiries by subject
- Revisit: the history is where forgotten leads come back
- The database may be missing or corrupted — check
.cliodeck/brain.db - Or no session has been recorded yet: start a conversation
- Conversations are saved automatically; an abrupt shutdown may lose the last exchange
- Check the application logs
- A very large history can slow the journal panel down — there is no built-in way to trim it yet (see the note in Managing the history above)
- The Journal icon (book) in the sidebar — both sessions and individual exchanges live here, there's no separate history view
-
Ctrl/Cmd+Jfor the AI usage journal