Claude Control Center

Browse, search, inspect, organize, and resume your Claude Code sessions directly from Visual Studio Code.

Claude Control Center gives you a central place to explore your local Claude Code session history.

Quickly find previous sessions, search complete transcripts, favorite important conversations, identify sessions approaching cleanup, and resume work without manually digging through Claude Code's local files.

Everything stays local. Claude Control Center reads the session data created by Claude Code on your machine and does not upload your conversations to an external service.

Independent project: Claude Control Center is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic.

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Session management for Claude Code

Claude Code sessions can quickly accumulate across projects and directories.

Claude Control Center brings that history into VS Code and makes it easier to navigate.

Use it to:

• Browse Claude Code sessions across your projects
• Search complete conversation transcripts
• Favorite sessions you want to return to
• Quickly find recent sessions
• Find sessions approaching Claude Code's cleanup window
• Filter transcript content, including plan-mode messages
• Flag individual messages and filter down to just those
• Follow running sessions live as new messages are written
• Open any single message in its own editor tab, as Markdown or rendered preview
• Resume previous Claude Code sessions in the integrated terminal
• Open supported sessions in the Claude Code VS Code extension
• Track this month's spend, or your real Anthropic usage quota, from the status bar
• See exactly which files a session changed, and open a one-click diff

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Browse all your Claude Code sessions

Open the Claude Control Center icon in the Activity Bar and select Sessions.

Your Claude Code history is automatically organized by project folder.

Current and other folders

Project folders are separated into two groups:

Group	Description
Current folder	Workspace folders currently open in this VS Code window, including nested folders
Other folders	Other folders on your machine that contain Claude Code session history

Folders are ordered by most recent activity and display useful information such as session count and latest activity.

You can also filter folders by path to quickly narrow down larger session collections.

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Quickly find the session you need

Claude Control Center provides several cross-project views directly from the session tree.

Recent

See sessions from all folders ordered by their latest activity.

Sessions whose latest message falls within your configured activity threshold are considered Active.

Favorites

Star important sessions so you can return to them without searching through their project folder again.

Favorites are useful for long-running tasks, frequently referenced conversations, and work you know you will revisit.

Near deletion

Find sessions whose last activity is approaching Claude Code's own session-log cleanup window.

Claude Control Center can automatically derive this threshold from Claude Code's cleanupPeriodDays setting in:

~/.claude/settings.json

You can also configure the threshold manually.

This helps surface older sessions before Claude Code removes their local logs.

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Inspect complete session transcripts

Open any session to explore its full conversation in a dedicated editor.

Session messages can include:

• Role
• Timestamp
• Token counts
• Assistant model information
• Tool calls, each merged with its result into a single card
• Plan-mode messages, shown as distinct plan cards
• Skill invocations, shown as distinct skill cards

A tool call and the output it produced appear together on one card. The result starts collapsed behind a RESULT strip showing a short preview and a size hint, and expands in place when you want the full output.

Claude Code wrapper markup such as slash-command tags, task notifications, and system reminders is removed from the displayed conversation so the transcript stays focused on the actual interaction.

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Search and filter conversations

Large Claude Code sessions can contain a lot of information. Claude Control Center provides tools for narrowing the transcript down to what matters.

Transcript search

Search the complete conversation with:

• Match count
• Previous and next result navigation
• Automatic scrolling to the current result
• Automatic expansion of matching content
• Only matches mode

Transcript filters

Use built-in controls to change what is visible:

• Hide tools — hide tool-call cards
• Plans only — display only plan-mode content from the current session
• Flagged only — display only the messages you have flagged
• Oldest first / Newest first — reverse the conversation order
• Collapse all
• Expand all

The Plans only filter is useful when a long Claude Code session contains one or more planning phases and you want to focus only on those messages.

Each combination of sort order and filters is treated as its own list, so switching between them always starts from the top of the result rather than leaving you somewhere in the middle of the previous one.

Flag messages

Use the flag icon on any message to mark it. Flags are stored by Claude Control Center alongside your session titles and favorites — the original Claude Code logs are never modified.

Flagged only then narrows the transcript to just those messages, which is useful for collecting the handful of decisions or snippets that matter out of a long conversation.

Back to top

Once you have scrolled into a long transcript, a Back to top button appears over the message list and returns you to the first message in one click.

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Open a single message in its own tab

Any message in a transcript has an Open in editor tab action that opens just that message as a Markdown document, so you can read it full-width, copy from it, or keep it open beside your code.

Because it opens as Markdown, VS Code's own Markdown preview works on it. Use the claudeCodeManager.messageOpenMode setting to choose how it opens:

Mode	Behavior
source	Raw Markdown, with VS Code's Open Preview button in the tab bar
preview	VS Code's rendered Markdown preview
previewToSide	Rendered preview in the editor column beside the transcript

The document is read-only and generated from the session log — nothing is written back to Claude Code's files.

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Live updates

An open transcript follows its session as Claude Code writes to it. Start a session in the terminal and its messages appear in the panel as they are produced, without reopening the tab.

Updates are incremental: only newly appended messages are read and sent to the panel, so following a long-running conversation stays responsive rather than re-reading the whole session log each time it changes.

Your scroll position, collapsed cards, active search, and filters are all preserved across an update.

The session's message count, status, and last-activity time in the header update alongside the transcript.

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Large sessions

Long conversations are loaded progressively. The transcript mounts the first chunk of messages immediately and adds more as you scroll, so opening a session with thousands of messages does not stall on the whole conversation at once.

Search, filters, and match counts always operate on the complete conversation, not just the part currently rendered.

Individual tool inputs and outputs are truncated for display once they exceed claudeCodeManager.maxToolOutputChars, with a marker showing how much was cut. A single large file read or unfiltered command can otherwise dominate a transcript. Set the value to 0 to disable truncation.

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Track usage and cost

A Usage item in VS Code's status bar (bottom right) keeps a running figure in view without opening the panel at all, and clicking it opens the Budget page.

Claude Control Center tracks usage by tokens by default: your real 5-hour and 7-day quota utilization, read from Claude Code's own sign-in — the same data the claude CLI's own /usage command shows. Hover the status bar item for the full breakdown — both quota windows, their reset times, and when it was last checked.

Live quota is never fetched automatically in the background unless you turn that on: checking it calls Anthropic's usage endpoint, so it only happens when you click Refresh in Settings or Budget, or if you enable Automatically refresh live quota in Settings (every 5 minutes). Claude Control Center never modifies your Claude Code sign-in to do this.

A money mode also exists (claudeCodeManager.usageMode: "money") — this month's local spend, computed from token usage × per-model rates, optionally against a configured monthly $ limit — but it is no longer offered as a switch in Settings' UI. It's set aside for now, not removed: setting the value directly in settings.json still works exactly as before.

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Budget

Open Budget from the sidebar (or click the status bar Usage item) for a token-only view of your consumption:

• Today, and a Consumption per day bar chart with a 7/14/30-day switch, both built from your local session logs.
• Statistics — average per day, busiest day, active vs. idle days.
• 5-hour and 7-day windows — your real utilization percentage and reset time from Anthropic's own usage endpoint, the same data the status bar and Settings' Live quota block show.

Unlike the money figures above, nothing on this page is expressed as "percent of an allowance" — Anthropic's usage endpoint reports utilization percentages only, never an absolute token budget to divide local counts by, so the page shows real counts and real percentages side by side rather than guessing at one from the other.

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See what a session changed

Open any session whose conversation wrote or edited files, and a Transcript / Files changed switcher appears at the top of the session screen, with the session's total +N −N next to it.

Switch to Files changed for a flat table of every file touched, with its status, total lines added and removed, and edit count. Two actions per row:

• Open diff compares the file before the session's first edit to after its last one, in VS Code's real diff editor.
• Go to message jumps straight back to the transcript message that made the change, switching back to the Transcript view to do it.

You can also review a change from the message that made it: a message that edited files shows a small file chip in its header. Clicking it opens a popover listing just what that message changed, with its own diff button — scoped to that one edit, not the file's whole session footprint — and a Show in Files changed link back to the full table.

The diff is reconstructed entirely from the session's own log — no git repository is required, and it reflects what the session actually did, which is not necessarily the file's current state on disk if it has changed since.

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Resume previous Claude Code sessions

Claude Control Center is not only a history viewer. You can continue working from an existing session.

Resume in terminal

Select Resume in terminal to reopen the session with Claude Code in VS Code's integrated terminal.

The terminal starts in the session's original working directory.

If you resume the same session again, Claude Control Center reuses its existing terminal instead of opening a duplicate.

Open in Claude Code VS Code UI

If the official Claude Code VS Code extension is installed, supported sessions also show an Open in VS Code UI action.

This hands the session to the Claude Code extension so you can continue the same conversation there.

The action is available for sessions whose project directory exactly matches the workspace root currently open in VS Code.

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Session actions

Each session provides a ⋯ menu with actions including:

• Open in new tab
• Add to favorites
• Remove from favorites

You can also middle-click a session to open it directly in its own editor tab.

This makes it easy to keep the session you are inspecting open while navigating through other Claude Code history.

Rename a session

Session titles are derived from the first prompt in the conversation, which is not always a useful name. Use the pencil icon in the transcript header to give a session your own title.

Renaming is stored by Claude Control Center, not written into Claude Code's session logs, so the original file is left exactly as Claude Code wrote it.

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Privacy first

Claude Control Center works with your existing local Claude Code data.

The extension:

• Reads session information from your local Claude Code project directory
• Does not modify Claude Code session logs
• Does not upload session content
• Does not send your conversations to an external service

Custom titles, favorites, and message flags are stored separately in the extension's own storage, so none of Claude Code's append-only session logs are ever written to.

By default, session history is read from:

~/.claude/projects

You can select a different directory in the extension settings.

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Requirements

Claude Code must already be installed and available through the:

claude

command.

Claude Control Center expects Claude Code session logs to be available locally. By default, it looks in:

~/.claude/projects

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Extension settings

Claude Control Center provides the following configuration options:

Setting	Default	Description
claudeCodeManager.projectsDirectory	Empty	Directory containing Claude Code session logs. When empty, ~/.claude/projects is used.
claudeCodeManager.activeThresholdMinutes	30	Sessions newer than this number of minutes are considered Active.
claudeCodeManager.nearDeletionThresholdDays	Auto	Age at which sessions appear under Near deletion. When unset, the value is derived from Claude Code's cleanup period, one day early.
claudeCodeManager.notifyFavoriteDeletion	false	Show a notification when a favorited session enters the Near deletion window.
claudeCodeManager.messageOpenMode	source	How Open in editor tab presents a message: source, preview, or previewToSide.
claudeCodeManager.maxToolOutputChars	20000	Longest tool input or output shown on one transcript card before it is truncated. 0 disables truncation.
claudeCodeManager.usageMode	tokens	What the status bar Usage figure tracks: tokens (real 5h/7d quota from Anthropic) or money (this month's local spend — no longer offered in Settings' UI, but still honored if set here directly).
claudeCodeManager.hasMonthlyLimit	false	Money mode only. Whether monthlyLimitUsd is enforced as a visible budget, shown as a percentage.
claudeCodeManager.monthlyLimitUsd	0	Monthly spend limit in USD, used when hasMonthlyLimit is on. Resets on the first of the month.
claudeCodeManager.autoRefreshLiveQuota	false	Tokens mode only. Automatically re-check your live 5h/7d quota every 5 minutes, instead of only on a manual Refresh.

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Getting started

1. Install Claude Control Center.
2. Make sure Claude Code is installed and the claude command is available.
3. Open the Claude Control Center icon in the VS Code Activity Bar.
4. Select Sessions.
5. Browse your existing Claude Code conversations.
6. Open a session to inspect it.
7. Use Resume in terminal when you want to continue working.

No import or migration is required. Claude Control Center uses your existing local Claude Code history.

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Feedback & issues

Found a bug or have an idea for Claude Control Center?

Please open an issue in the project repository.

Feature requests and feedback are welcome.

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Disclaimer

Claude Control Center is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic.

Claude, Claude Code, and related names are trademarks of Anthropic.