If you've been running Claude Code across multiple projects, you know the pain: sessions scattered everywhere, some still chugging away in forgotten terminal tabs, others closed mid-task with no trace of what you were working on. A new community tool called Claude Session Manager aims to solve exactly that chaos—giving you a single web dashboard to see every session, grouped by project, with rich context at your fingertips.
The Problem With Forgetting
You start a Claude Code session in some deep folder, get pulled into a meeting, and forget it's even running. Days later you're wondering which directory that ambitious refactor was in, or whether that session is still burning CPU cycles in the background. Claude Session Manager reads read-only from your local ~/.claude directory—specifically ~/.claude/sessions/
Three Views, One Source of Truth
The dashboard offers three distinct ways to browse your session history. The List view groups sessions by project with a detail panel showing the original goal (first prompt), latest state (last prompt), full prompt history, any screenshots you pasted in, message counts, duration, branch name, PID, and folder path. The Timeline view plots all sessions on an absolute Gantt-style axis so you can see exactly when each one ran and where the activity clusters. The Board view lets you drag sessions across custom kanban columns—perfect for tracking work-in-progress versus completed tasks.
Live Status and Practical Controls
Sessions display color-coded status indicators: green for running, yellow for idle, black for closed—all verified via real process checks rather than timestamps. From any session card you can resume it in a new terminal (with presets for PowerShell, cmd, Windows Terminal on Windows; Terminal.app, iTerm on macOS; gnome-terminal, konsole, xterm on Linux), open its folder directly, or add your own notes. Everything is stored in a sidecar file (~/.claude/session-manager-state.json) that leaves your original Claude Code data untouched.
Privacy-First Architecture
This tool is aggressively local. It spins up a plain Node HTTP server on localhost (default port 4317), serves the web UI only to your machine, and never touches the network beyond that. The app ships as a single server.js file, a single index.html, and some lang/*.json translation files—no npm install required, no dependencies to manage. Just clone, run node server.js, and open http://localhost:4317 in your browser.
Roadmap and Community Direction
The project is explicitly unofficial—nothing to do with Anthropic—and MIT licensed for maximum flexibility. The roadmap includes support for other AI coding assistants beyond Claude Code through a pluggable session provider system, full-text search across transcripts, notifications for forgotten idle sessions, optional git status per folder, GitHub-style activity pulses in the timeline, and eventually a plugin architecture for drop-in modules.
Key Takeaways
- Zero-dependency Node.js dashboard runs entirely locally on localhost:4317
- Three browsing modes: List (grouped by project), Timeline (Gantt-style), Board (kanban)
- Read-only access to ~/.claude data leaves original files untouched
- Open roadmap includes multi-assistant support and full-text transcript search
The Bottom Line
Claude Session Manager is the kind of tool that should've existed years ago—zero friction to install, respects your data completely, and actually solves a real workflow problem. If you live in Claude Code across multiple projects, this dashboard will pay for itself the first time it helps you recover a half-finished session instead of starting from scratch.