CodeHist - GitHub Copilot Chat History Extractor

A simple tool for extracting and analyzing GitHub Copilot chat history from VS Code.

Features

• Extract Real Chat History: Discovers and parses actual GitHub Copilot chat sessions from VS Code data directories
• Cross-Platform Support: Works with VS Code, VS Code Insiders, and other variants
• Multiple Export Formats: Export to JSON and Markdown
• Search Functionality: Search through chat content to find specific conversations
• Statistics: View usage statistics and patterns

Installation

# Clone the repository
git clone <repository-url>
cd codehist

# Install in development mode
pip install -e .

Usage

Command Line Interface

# Show chat statistics
python -m codehist stats

# List all chat sessions
python -m codehist chat

# Search chat content
python -m codehist search "error handling"

# Export to JSON
python -m codehist export --format json --output chat_history.json

# Export to Markdown
python -m codehist export --format markdown --output chat_history.md

Programmatic Usage

from codehist import CopilotParser, JSONExporter

# Parse chat data
parser = CopilotParser()
data = parser.discover_vscode_copilot_data()

# Export to JSON
exporter = JSONExporter()
exporter.export_chat_data(data.to_dict(), Path("output.json"))

How It Works

CodeHist discovers GitHub Copilot chat sessions stored in VS Code's application data:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Code*/User/workspaceStorage/*/chatSessions/
• Windows: %APPDATA%/Code*/User/workspaceStorage/*/chatSessions/
• Linux: ~/.config/Code*/User/workspaceStorage/*/chatSessions/

Each chat session is stored as a JSON file containing the conversation between you and GitHub Copilot.

Data Extracted

• Chat Sessions: Complete conversation threads with timestamps
• Messages: Individual user and assistant messages with metadata
• Workspace Context: Which project/workspace the chat occurred in
• Session Types: Different types of interactions (chat, editing sessions, etc.)

Privacy & Security

• All data parsing happens locally on your machine
• No data is sent to external services
• You control what data is exported and where

Example Output

                       GitHub Copilot Chat Statistics                        
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Metric         ┃ Value                                                    ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ Total Sessions │ 228                                                      │
│ Total Messages │ 880                                                      │
│ Date Range     │ 2025-05-27 to 2025-07-15                               │
└────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Session Types:
  • chat_editing_session: 116
  • chat_session: 112

Message Types:
  • editing_session: 379
  • snapshot: 116
  • user_request: 385

Architecture

The project is structured for simplicity and focus:

codehist/
├── models.py              # Data models (ChatSession, Message, etc.)
├── parsers/
│   └── copilot.py         # GitHub Copilot chat parser
├── exporters/
│   ├── json.py            # JSON export
│   └── markdown.py        # Markdown export
└── cli.py                 # Command-line interface

Contributing

This project focuses specifically on GitHub Copilot chat history extraction. Contributions that enhance this core functionality are welcome.

License

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.