session-search

name

session-search

description

Full-text search across Claude Code session transcripts — finds past sessions by message CONTENT, not just title (the built-in session pickers in the CLI and the VSCode/Cursor extension only match titles). Use whenever the user wants to locate or resume a past session/conversation by what was discussed in it, e.g. "find the session where we discussed X", "which chat did I fix Y in", "search my sessions for Z", "when did I talk about W with you", "did we already debug this somewhere", or any request to grep/search Claude Code history or transcripts.

Session Search

Search the contents of past Claude Code sessions (all messages, not just titles) and return session IDs the user can resume.

How

Run the bundled script (stdlib-only, use system python3):

python3 ~/.claude/skills/session-search/scripts/search_sessions.py TERM [TERM ...]

• Multiple terms are ANDed: a session must contain all of them (case-insensitive substring), anywhere in its user/assistant message text.
• Defaults to the current project's sessions. Results are sorted newest-first.

Useful flags:

Flag	Effect
--all-projects	search every project under ~/.claude/projects/
--project PATH	search the sessions of another project directory
--regex 'PATTERN'	single case-insensitive regex instead of AND-terms
--include-tools	also match tool inputs/outputs and metadata (file paths, command output)
--thinking	also search assistant thinking blocks
--limit N	show more than the default 10 sessions

Interpreting output

Each hit prints the session ID, last-modified time, number of matching messages, the session's first user message (as a title), up to 3 snippets with the match marked «like this», and a ready-to-run resume command.

Answering the user

• Report the most likely session(s) with their title, date, and a snippet — don't just dump raw output if it's long.
• Tell them how to open it:
  • Terminal: claude --resume <session-id> (run from the matching project directory).
  • VSCode/Cursor extension: the picker can't jump to an ID, so point them to the session by its title and date shown in the output.
• If terms are too common (many sessions match), suggest adding a second distinguishing term rather than eyeballing dozens of hits. If nothing matches, retry with fewer/shorter terms or --include-tools (the phrase may have appeared in command output rather than message text).