Threadly

Group your AI chats and the files that go with them — right in the VS Code sidebar.

Marketplace · Issues · Privacy

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If you live in Claude, Codex, Copilot, Cursor or Cline, you know the problem: by the end of a project you have 8 chat tabs open, 14 file tabs, and no way to tell which goes with what. Switch tasks and the context is gone.

Threadly fixes that. Make a Thread per task. Drop chats and files into it. One click reopens the exact chat — not just the chat panel.

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Features

• Group anything in your sidebar. Files, folders, and AI chat threads — bundled per task.
• Reopen the exact chat. Click a saved chat → jumps straight to that conversation. Not "open the chat panel" — that thread.
• Bulk import in one click. Snapshot every open tab into a Thread, including chats.
• Browse past chats. Surface your entire chat history for the current project from disk — multi-select to add to a Thread.
• Color-code your Threads. 8 theme-aware colors so the auth Thread looks different from the mobile Thread at a glance.
• Reorder freely. Drag Threads around. Move Up / Move Down from the right-click menu.
• Inline-ish rename. F2 on a selected Thread, prefilled with live validation.
• Drag entries between Threads. Moved the wrong way? Drag it where it belongs.
• Persistent per workspace. Survives restarts. Each project has its own Threads, colors, and order.

Sits next to the native Open Editors panel — doesn't replace it, doesn't fight it.

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Why you want this

You're 40 minutes into refactoring auth. You have:

• 3 Claude chats (one debugging the migration, one drafting the new endpoint, one reviewing tests)
• 6 files open across two folders
• A doc tab with the spec

Then your boss pings — "can you quickly look at the dashboard bug?"

Without Threadly: close everything, lose your place, rebuild context tomorrow.

With Threadly: create a Thread called Auth Refactor, bulk-import, switch context. Tomorrow morning → right-click the Thread → Open All → you're back exactly where you left off, chats and all.

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Quick start

1. Install from the marketplace
2. Open the Explorer sidebar (Ctrl+Shift+E / Cmd+Shift+E)
3. Find the Threadly panel
4. Click the new folder icon → name your first Thread
5. Click the cloud-download icon → bulk-import every tab you currently have open
6. Click any saved chat → jumps back to that exact Claude/Codex session

Or click the history icon to browse every past chat for this project — even ones not currently open.

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Threadly stores pointers, not conversations

"Local state survives Anthropic UI changes. Pointer doesn't. Which way did you build it?" — fair question.

Pointer. Threadly stores session IDs and URIs, not the conversation content. Anthropic's own ~/.claude/projects/*.jsonl files are the source of truth. Snapshotting inside Threadly would diverge instantly the moment you continue a chat, and Anthropic's local files survive their UI changes anyway.

Tradeoff: if Anthropic renames a command or changes their URI scheme, Threadly's reopen logic breaks. That logic is ~50 lines and would be a one-patch fix.

Upside: if you uninstall Threadly tomorrow, you lose zero conversation data. The chats stay with Claude. Worst case = you re-create your Threads.

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How it works (the technical bit)

VS Code's extension API doesn't expose AI chat session IDs to other extensions. Threadly extracts them by:

1. For Claude — reading your workspace's state.vscdb SQLite file, where VS Code persists each webview tab's session ID alongside its title
2. For Codex — using its openai-codex: URI scheme, which already carries the session ID
3. For past chats — scanning ~/.claude/projects/<slug>/*.jsonl directly to surface sessions that aren't currently open

Each click then dispatches the right command (claude-vscode.editor.open for Claude, vscode.openWith for Codex) with the saved session ID.

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Supported AI extensions

Extension	Tabs imported	Reopens exact thread
Claude Code (Anthropic)	✅	✅
Codex (OpenAI)	✅	✅
GitHub Copilot Chat	✅	🚧 planned
Cursor	✅	🚧 planned
Cline	✅	🚧 planned
Continue	✅	🚧 planned

If you want first-class support for an extension not listed, open an issue with the extension's name and viewType — usually a 1-day add.

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Known limitations

• After window reload, clicking a still-open Claude chat may open a duplicate tab. This is a Claude extension limitation — its in-memory panel registry resets on reload. The conversation is the same; you just get two tabs pointing at it.
• Multi-window: if you have the same workspace open in two VS Code windows, the reopen target window isn't predictable.
• Closed sessions reopen from disk. If you've deleted a Claude/Codex session locally, the bookmark falls back to opening the chat panel.

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Privacy

Threadly reads two things, both local to your machine:

1. Your workspace's VS Code state database (state.vscdb) — to learn which chat tabs map to which session IDs
2. Your AI tool's session files (~/.claude/projects/*.jsonl, ~/.codex/, etc.) — only when you explicitly run Browse Past Chats

No network calls. No telemetry. No analytics. No accounts. Threadly cannot phone home — there's no server.

The full source is in this repo. grep -rn "fetch\|http" src/ returns nothing because Threadly doesn't reach out to anything.

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Roadmap

• Copilot Chat / Cursor / Cline thread reopening (same trick, different extensions)
• Export a Thread as a shareable JSON file (workflow templates)
• "Last accessed" timestamp on Threads
• Auto-suggest a Thread when you open files near each other
• "Snooze" a Thread (collapse for a week, then resurface)

Have a feature in mind? Open an issue.

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Building from source

git clone https://github.com/mavenzoho/threadly.git
cd threadly
npm install
npm run compile

Press F5 in VS Code to launch an Extension Development Host with Threadly loaded.

To package a .vsix for local install:

npx @vscode/vsce package
code --install-extension threadly-*.vsix

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Changelog

See GitHub Releases.

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License

MIT — fork it, ship it, sell it, just keep the copyright notice.