Memowl

Browse and manage GitHub Copilot's native agent memories from a dedicated sidebar in VS Code.

Copilot's agent quietly accumulates memory files (project conventions, decisions, gotchas) as you work. They live as plain Markdown on your machine, but there is no built-in UI to see or manage them. Memowl fills that gap — and, unlike a plain file browser, it understands Copilot's scope model and maps opaque workspaceStorage hashes back to the real workspace they belong to.

Features

• Scope-aware tree — memory roots grouped as:
  • User (global) — shared across all workspaces
  • This workspace — the store for the workspace you have open now
  • Other workspaces — every other workspace that has memories, each labelled with the folder / .code-workspace name it maps to (not just a hash)
• Well-known scope hints — repo/ and session/ subfolders are annotated with their meaning.
• Manage — create, open, delete memories; reveal in the OS file explorer; copy path.
• Chat sessions per workspace — a second view lists your Copilot chat history grouped by the workspace it belongs to, so you can find the conversation you lost track of. Click one to resume it; chats from another workspace offer to reopen that workspace in a new window and continue there. Use the title-bar toggle to switch between grouping by workspace (ordered by most recent chat) and by recency (a flat list across every workspace, bucketed by day).
• Reliable location — anchors on the extension's own storage URIs, so it finds the Copilot store correctly across VS Code, Insiders and VSCodium, on any OS.

Scopes explained

Copilot keeps memories in three scopes, and Memowl surfaces all of them so you always know where a note applies:

Repository and session memories are keyed to a workspace hash, not a git repo — see the next section.

Install

Install Memowl from the Visual Studio Marketplace, or from the Extensions view with:

ext install jlieuw.memowl

Every release is also published on the GitHub Releases page with a downloadable .vsix.

Why the hash mapping matters

Copilot's repository-scoped memory is keyed to a workspace hash, not to a git repo. Open the same folder as part of a different (e.g. multi-root) workspace and it gets a different store. Memowl shows this explicitly so you always know which memories apply where.

Where memories are stored

<User>/globalStorage/GitHub.copilot-chat/memory-tool/memories/            <- User (global)
<User>/workspaceStorage/<hash>/GitHub.copilot-chat/memory-tool/memories/  <- per-workspace (repo/, session/)

Where chat sessions are stored

<User>/workspaceStorage/<hash>/chatSessions/<sessionId>.jsonl

Each conversation is an append-only log keyed to the same workspace hash, which is why a chat can only be resumed in a window that has that workspace open.

Run the prototype

npm install
npm run compile

Then press F5 (Run Memowl) to launch an Extension Development Host, and open the Memowl icon in the Activity Bar.

Status

Early prototype. Read/manage of the on-disk store only; it does not modify Copilot's runtime behavior.

Disclaimer

Memowl is an independent, community-built tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by GitHub or Microsoft. "GitHub" and "Copilot" are trademarks of their respective owners, referenced here only to describe interoperability.