Claude Code Nest

A read-only organizer for your Claude Code chat history, right in the VS Code sidebar.

Claude Code Nest adds its own Activity Bar panel that turns a sprawling pile of Claude Code sessions into folders, tags, links, stars, and an archive, so you can find and revisit any chat without it ever touching Claude's transcripts.

Features

• Organize panel. The primary view, with a Starred section, a Questions section (chats with an unread assistant turn that asks something, a scan-time heuristic labeled as such), a single-home folder hierarchy with per-folder color and counts, and an always-present Unsorted bucket. Folders are collapsible (with a collapse-one-level control and full keyboard navigation). Tag filter chips, sort, folder rename, drag-to-unfile, and in-panel drag-and-drop. Each chat row carries a hover-revealed add-tag + control, and a row whose tag pills overflow drifts them slowly so every tag is readable (static under reduced motion). The panel follows your VS Code theme.
• Unread and question markers. Each chat row shows where it stands: a blinking ? badge when Claude's last message asks you something, and a solid unread dot when Claude replied and you have not looked yet. Both clear as soon as you open the chat, either from the panel or by focusing its Claude Code tab. This read state is per device and is never synced. The focused chat also gets a subtle active-row tint, and Questions and search results show each chat's folder breadcrumb.
• Full-text content search. Search across chat content from the Organize panel and see a matched-context snippet under each result. Clearing the query restores the full list.
• Star and archive. Starred chats surface in the Starred section; archived chats move into an in-panel Archive overlay reached from the bottom "Archived" row. Archiving keeps a Nest-owned copy of the chat body in the extension's own storage, so the chat survives Claude Code's own cleanup of the transcript folder. Restore (or starring an archived chat) returns it and clears the copy. An auto-archive engine archives unstarred chats past your keep window and protectively body-copies starred chats past Claude's deletion age. The row star toggle and the right-click context menu carry the live-chat star and archive controls.
• Per-chat export. One chat to Markdown (a YAML front-matter org layer plus the readable transcript) or JSON (a versioned, round-trippable document), from the chat-row context menu or the Archive overlay; whole-library export and import work too.
• Token cost rollups. Sum each chat's token usage by folder and by tag in a read-only report. Tokens only, never dollars.
• Settings overlay. An in-panel Settings overlay (the gear) sets the keep window and section visibility and reads and edits Claude Code's global cleanupPeriodDays through a single guarded write.
• One panel. The Organize panel is the single contributed view and the only browsing surface, with full keyboard navigation and ARIA tree semantics built in. Settings and Archive are in-panel overlays; the flat Chats, Smart Groups, and Archive trees and the standalone Settings tab are retired.

Clicking a chat opens or resumes it through Claude Code's public URI handler. Your organization is stored per project and follows you across machines on a best-effort, last-writer-wins basis, with a JSON export as the authoritative backup.

Requirements

• VS Code ^1.66.0
• Claude Code installed, with sessions under ~/.claude/projects/

Install

Install the packaged VSIX (the current release artifact is claude-code-nest-0.2.0.vsix, the v0.2.0 "One Panel" release, packaged in the repo root and distributed through the repository's GitHub Releases page; npx vsce package --no-dependencies -o claude-code-nest-0.2.0.vsix regenerates it. See TESTING.md for the install steps and the full smoke checklist):

• From a terminal: code --install-extension claude-code-nest-0.2.0.vsix
• Or in VS Code: open the Extensions view, use the ... menu, choose Install from VSIX..., and select claude-code-nest-0.2.0.vsix

Reload the window when prompted, then open a folder that has Claude Code sessions so the extension has chats to list.

Getting started

1. Click the Claude Code Nest icon in the Activity Bar to open the panel.
2. In the Organize view, create a folder or a tag, then drag chats onto it. A chat has one folder home and any number of tags.
3. Use the search box to find a chat by its content.
4. Run the Get Started with Claude Code Nest walkthrough from the Command Palette for a guided tour.

Settings

Setting	Default	Description
claudeNest.archiveKeepWindowDays	30	How long Nest keeps its own copy of an archived chat body before pruning it (7, 30, 90, or 0 for never). Starred archived chats are always kept. The copy is local and is never synced.

The in-panel Settings overlay (the gear in the Organize panel toolbar) sets the keep window and section visibility, and reads and edits Claude Code's global cleanupPeriodDays in ~/.claude/settings.json. That is a global Claude Code setting, not a Nest setting, so it affects every workspace; the write is a single surgical key edit routed through the read-only chokepoint.

Commands

Commands live under the Claude Code Nest category in the Command Palette or as view-title buttons on the Organize panel:

• Refresh re-scans the transcripts under a cancellable progress indicator.
• New Folder, New Tag, Link to Chat..., and Unlink organize chats (the link commands quick-pick their chats when run from the palette).
• Export Library to JSON... and Import Library from JSON... move your library in and out.
• Show Token Cost Rollup opens the by-folder and by-tag token report.
• Settings (shown as "Claude Code Nest: Settings") reveals the Organize panel and opens its in-panel Settings overlay.

Starring, archiving, restoring, and previewing an archived copy live inside the Organize panel: the row star toggle, the right-click context menu, and the in-panel Archive overlay reached from the bottom "Archived" row carry those actions.

Data and privacy

Privacy is the point of this extension, not a footnote.

• Strictly read-only over your transcripts. Nest never writes, renames, moves, or deletes anything under ~/.claude/projects/. It reads the JSONL transcripts and nothing more. If Nest fails, Claude Code is entirely unaffected.
• One sanctioned write, behind a guard. The only write anywhere under ~/.claude is the surgical, single-key edit of cleanupPeriodDays in settings.json, routed through a guarded chokepoint that refuses any target except that one file. Every other file Nest writes (the archive copies, exports, and the search index) lives in the extension's own storage, never under ~/.claude/projects/.
• No telemetry, no network. Nest sends no telemetry and makes no network calls. Your chat content stays on your machine. Full message bodies are read on demand for one chat at a time and discarded; only bounded per-chat summaries are kept.
• The search index never syncs. It lives in the extension's local storage, is never registered for Settings Sync, and is never written under ~/.claude/projects/.

More

• TESTING.md: install steps and the manual smoke checklist.
• CHANGELOG.md: the per-release and per-slice record.

Licensed under MIT.