claude-code - 💡(How to fix) Fix [FEATURE] Feature request: cross-project session resume / global history view [1 comments, 2 participants]

Preflight Checklist

• I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

Summary

/resume (and claude --resume without a session UUID) is scoped to the current working directory's project folder under ~/.claude/projects/. There's no built-in way to browse or resume sessions from other projects without already knowing the session UUID.

Why this matters

Users with many active projects (I currently have 20+ project folders under ~/.claude/projects/) routinely need to find a recent session by topic or recency rather than by project. Today this requires one of:

1. Remembering which directory a session was started from and cd-ing there before launching claude.
2. Manually grepping the JSONL files under ~/.claude/projects/.
3. Writing a custom script to enumerate sessions across projects (which I ended up doing, see below).

This is friction that adds up when you switch projects often. The data is already on disk in a clean JSONL format — Claude Code just doesn't surface it cross-project.

Proposed Solution

Any of the following would solve this; listed in increasing scope:

1. /resume --global (or a separate /history command): an interactive picker that lists sessions across all ~/.claude/projects/<encoded-cwd>/ folders, sorted by recency, showing the project cwd + first user prompt as preview. Selecting one would change the active project root to that session's cwd (so tool allowlists, MCP scopes, and CLAUDE.md inheritance stay correct) and load the session.

2. claude history CLI subcommand: a one-shot command (e.g. claude history --limit 30 [--filter <substring>]) that prints the same view to stdout, without entering an interactive session. Useful for scripting and for finding a session UUID to feed to claude --resume.

3. A flag on claude --resume <id> that warns the user when the session's original cwd differs from the current shell, and offers to switch — so resuming a cross-project session can never silently mis-bind tool permissions and project context.

Alternative Solutions

• Encouraging users to cd first — works but assumes the user remembers which project a session belongs to, which is exactly what they're trying to rediscover.
• A user-side script reading ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl — works for read-only listing (I wrote one), but it cannot safely resume a session cross-project because it can't re-bind the working directory, MCP scopes, or CLAUDE.md inheritance the way Claude Code itself can.

Priority

High - Significant impact on productivity

Feature Category

CLI commands and flags

Use Case Example

No response

Additional Context

Why first-class support matters

The non-trivial part isn't the listing — it's the safe resume. Tool allowlists, MCP server scopes, and CLAUDE.md inheritance are all cwd-bound in Claude Code, so a "global resume" must re-bind those correctly when crossing project roots. That's the part user-side scripts can't do.

Environment

• Claude Code on Windows 11 (PowerShell), but the request is platform-agnostic.
• Sessions stored under %USERPROFILE%\.claude\projects\<encoded-cwd>\*.jsonl.