A sidebar for VS Code that keeps every Claude Code session one click away.
Quick Launch adds a panel to the Activity Bar with your project folders and servers. Click a project and a terminal opens in that folder running claude. Each live session shows as a row under its folder with a short label of what it is about, turns green while Claude is working, and pulses when an answer is waiting for you. Close VS Code and reopen it: every session comes back, resumed where it was.
What you get
Projects: your folders, split into Active and Inactive. A folder you work in moves to Active by itself, and goes back to Inactive when its last session closes.
Sessions: one row per live Claude conversation, with tags naming its subjects, an unread marker when Claude has answered, and a History node to reopen past conversations.
Servers: one click opens a terminal and runs your SSH command.
Questions: a panel in the secondary side bar listing what you asked in the current session, each with a short summary of the answer. Click one to read the whole reply.
Skills, Hooks, MCP: what is installed in your own ~/.claude folder, read live.
Clickable paths: file paths printed in a terminal open the file, or reveal it in Finder or Explorer.
Requirements
VS Code 1.106 or newer.
Claude Code installed and logged in (claude must run from a terminal).
Windows only: PowerShell (included with Windows).
Works on macOS, Windows and Linux.
Install
From the Marketplace: open VS Code, go to Extensions, search for Quick Launch, click Install.
In Projects, click + and pick a folder. Repeat for each project.
In Servers, click +, give it a name and the command to run (for example ssh user@host).
Click a project. A terminal opens there and runs claude.
The command run in new project terminals is the setting quickLaunch.autoCommand (default claude). Leave it empty for a plain shell.
How it stays out of your way
Your projects and servers are VS Code user settings (quickLaunch.projects, quickLaunch.servers, and friends). Settings Sync carries them to your other machines.
The extension installs one small Claude Code hook, ~/.claude/quicklaunch-session-hook.sh (.ps1 on Windows), registered under SessionStart in ~/.claude/settings.json. It records which conversation runs in which terminal so sessions can be resumed after a restart. It does nothing for Claude sessions started outside Quick Launch.
Session labels and answer summaries are produced by short claude -p calls with a small model, at most one at a time, never more than once an hour per session.
Everything it remembers lives in small JSON files under ~/.claude/quicklaunch-*.json. Delete them to start clean.
