How to find and resume old Claude Code and Codex conversations in 2026: 8 ways compared

Disclosure: Enjoy is our product. We checked every way below against its maker’s own pages on November 10, 2026, and we say where another way is the better pick, including the free ones that don’t need Enjoy.

The ways to find an old conversation, compared

If you use one lab’s agent, start with its own picker. In a terminal, claude --resume and codex resume list your past sessions, search them, and reopen the one you pick with its full history. Claude’s desktop app, its VS Code extension and the ChatGPT app keep searchable lists of their own. The other ways are for searching both agents’ history at once, for finding a phrase across everything, or for carrying an old conversation on with another lab’s agent.

Way	Best for	Price, checked November 10, 2026	Where it looks	Continues it in
Claude Code’s session picker	A Claude Code session from the terminal	Included in Claude Pro ($20 a month), Max ($100), Ultra ($200), Team and Enterprise	This folder; Ctrl+A for every project	The terminal
Claude’s desktop app and VS Code extension	Claude Code sessions in an app	Included in the same plans	Each app’s own list; the desktop app’s /resume lists terminal sessions	The app
Codex’s resume picker and the ChatGPT app	Codex chats	Codex comes with every ChatGPT plan, from Free; the CLI from Plus ($20 a month)	This folder; All for every folder	The terminal or the app
Search the files yourself	Finding a phrase anywhere, free	Free	Every transcript on the computer	The agent’s own CLI
Claude Code History Viewer	Both agents’ history in one free app	Free	Local history from 31 assistants	Copies the resume command
Agent Sessions	Both agents’ history on a Mac, free	Free	Local history from 16 agents	Opens it in your terminal
claude-history	Both agents’ history in the terminal, free	Free	Every project, or this one	Resumes or forks it
Enjoy	A project’s Claude Code and Codex conversations, continued by any lab’s agent	Free to import and read; agents need the subscription, free for 7 days (pricing)	The project’s folder	Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build, Antigravity, Muse Code, OpenCode

Prices are per month as each maker lists them, before tax. Every way reads conversations already on your computer and continues them on your own AI accounts, which their companies bill for separately.

Why old conversations go missing

Both agents save sessions on your computer as you work, and three things hide them:

• The folder. “Claude Code stores sessions per project directory,” and its picker starts with “Sessions from the current worktree,” say Anthropic’s docs. Codex’s codex resume “scopes --last to the current working directory unless you pass --all.”
• The age. “Claude Code deletes the files in the paths below once they’re older than cleanupPeriodDays,” and “The default is 30 days,” its directory reference says. Once a transcript is gone, no tool below can bring it back.
• The surface. “The desktop app, claude.ai/code, and the VS Code extension each keep their own session list.” And some sessions never reach the picker: those “whose first prompt was a /loop command don’t appear,” and Claude Code leaves “sessions created with claude -p or the Agent SDK out of the session picker.”

Claude Code’s session picker

Best for: finding and reopening a Claude Code session from the terminal.

claude --continue “Reopens the most recent session in the current directory,” claude --resume “Opens the session picker,” and /resume “Switches to a different session from inside an active session,” says the sessions page. In the picker, typing / or most letters starts a search, Space previews a session, Ctrl+A will “Show sessions from all projects on this machine,” and Ctrl+B filters “to sessions from the current git branch.” Name a session with /rename or claude -n, and claude --resume <name> “Resumes the named session directly.” The resumed session gets back its messages, tool calls and results, and usually its model and permission mode.

To keep sessions past 30 days, set cleanupPeriodDays in ~/.claude/settings.json, such as {"cleanupPeriodDays": 365}. The default “is 30 days and the minimum is 1; setting 0 fails with a validation error.” To keep one conversation as text, /export will “copy the current conversation to your clipboard or save it as a plain-text file.”

Price: included with Claude Code. Claude’s pricing has Pro at $20 a month, or $17 a month billed yearly, Max at $100 and Ultra at $200, and the Free plan doesn’t include Claude Code. Team and Enterprise include it too.

Watch for: a long conversation costs usage to pick up again. On Pro, Max and Ultra, a Resume this conversation? dialog can appear “when you resume a long conversation after a long break or on a different model,” and “its estimate is the share of your 5-hour usage limit that the saved conversation alone would use.” Some launch flags, such as --mcp-config and --add-dir, aren’t restored, so “pass them again when you resume.”

Claude’s desktop app and VS Code extension

Best for: Claude Code sessions you’d rather find with a mouse.

In the desktop app, on Mac and Windows with Linux in beta, sessions sit in the sidebar, where you group, sort and find archived ones. It can reach your terminal sessions too: type /resume, and “Desktop lists the sessions you started from the CLI on this computer. Search by title, folder, or branch, and preview where each one left off.” Close the session in the terminal first. Desktop “continues the same session rather than a copy, so claude --resume in the terminal still finds it afterwards.”

In VS Code, “Click the Session history button at the top of the Claude Code panel to access your conversation history. You can search by keyword or browse by time.” “The extension and CLI share the same conversation history.”

Price: included in the same Claude plans.

Watch for: the desktop app’s /resume “is available in local sessions, not in SSH, WSL, or cloud sessions.” In VS Code, “a session with no activity for 14 days moves to Archived sessions automatically,” so look there for older ones, or change the Archive Inactive Sessions setting.

Codex’s resume picker and the ChatGPT app

Best for: Codex chats, in the terminal or the app.

codex resume will “Reopen a recent chat from the current repository, or search across local chats when you need to return to older work,” says the Codex CLI’s page. codex resume --last reopens the most recent chat in the folder, and codex resume --last --all the most recent anywhere. Inside a chat, /resume asks you to “Choose a search scope in the picker. Cwd shows chats from the current directory,” and “All searches across directories,” per the developer commands. Codex “reloads the selected chat’s transcript so you can pick up where you left off.” codex fork copies an old chat into a new one, and codex archive cleans up the picker “without deleting the transcript.”

In the ChatGPT desktop app, “Open Search chats from the sidebar to find a past chat when you remember a phrase or branch name but not the title,” says its projects page.

Price: Codex’s pricing puts it in every ChatGPT plan: Free, Go at $8 a month, Plus at $20 and Pro from $100. Plus adds “Codex on the web, in the CLI, in the IDE extension, and on iOS”; Free and Go get the desktop app.

Watch for: if the folder you resume from isn’t the chat’s own, “Codex asks which directory to use.” In the app, the sidebar filters chats by the state of a project: “If you’re missing chats, select the filter icon next to Chats, then select Chronological. If you still don’t see the chat, open Settings and check Archived chats,” the troubleshooting page says.

Search the files yourself

Best for: finding a phrase you remember in any old session, for free.

Claude Code keeps each session “as JSONL at ~/.claude/projects/<project>/<session-id>.jsonl,” and “Codex stores its local state under CODEX_HOME (defaults to ~/.codex),” says Codex’s advanced configuration page. Search both with a tool like grep or rg. For Claude Code, claude --resume <transcript-path> “Resumes the session stored in the .jsonl transcript file at that absolute path,” and claude --resume <session-id> works “from any directory.” For Codex, codex resume takes a session ID.

Price: free.

Watch for: Anthropic says the format “is internal to Claude Code and changes between versions, so scripts that parse these files directly can break on any release.” Claude Code’s “Transcripts and history are not encrypted at rest,” and “Anything that passes through a tool is written to a transcript on disk,” so a key a command printed is in there too.

Claude Code History Viewer

Best for: one free app that searches Claude Code, Codex and most other agents’ history.

Claude Code History Viewer, despite its name, reads “Thirty-one assistants,” from Claude Code and Codex CLI to Cursor, Gemini CLI and OpenCode, “as a desktop app or headless server.” Its Global Search will “Search across all conversations from all providers instantly.” It’s free under the MIT license, for macOS, Windows and Linux, and “Conversation files are read from local disk; no conversation data is uploaded, and there is no analytics, tracking, or telemetry.” Its latest release, v1.32.2, came out on October 20, 2026.

Price: free.

Watch for: it views and searches; to continue a session, its right-click Copy Resume Command gives you the command to paste into a terminal, and the agent’s own CLI takes it from there.

Agent Sessions

Best for: Mac users who want to search both agents’ history and jump back in.

Agent Sessions is a free, MIT-licensed app that searches “local conversations from Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, and 13 other coding agents in one Mac app.” To pick a session up, “Copy a resume command or open a supported CLI session in Terminal.app, iTerm2, Warp, or Ghostty.” “Your session history stays on your Mac. No telemetry.” It also shows how fast each session uses your 5-hour and weekly limits. It installs from GitHub or with Homebrew, and its latest version is 6.5.

Price: free.

Watch for: it’s Mac only. And its dollar figures are estimates: “The dollar view is an API-equivalent estimate, not your subscription bill.”

claude-history

Best for: a fast search of both agents’ history without leaving the terminal.

claude-history is a fuzzy-search browser, free under the MIT license, and “Despite the name, claude-history also supports Codex,” along with Pi and Oh My Pi. “By default, claude-history shows all conversations from every project,” and “Press Tab to toggle between all conversations and the current workspace only.” Open a transcript to read it, copy or export it, press Ctrl+R to resume it, or Ctrl+F to fork it.

Price: free.

Watch for: its prebuilt “Release archives include Apple Silicon macOS (darwin-arm64), Intel macOS (darwin-amd64), and x86_64 Linux (linux-amd64) builds.” On Windows, you’d build it yourself with cargo install claude-history.

Enjoy

Best for: keeping a project’s Claude Code and Codex conversations in one list, and carrying any of them on with any lab’s agent.

Enjoy runs Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build, Antigravity, Muse Code, and local models through OpenCode, on Mac, Windows and Linux, on the plans you already have. Open a project’s folder, and Enjoy checks for its past conversations, from a terminal, an editor or the agents’ own apps, and offers to import them into the project’s conversation list. From there:

• Search them all at once. Search “looks through your messages, the agent’s replies, the agent’s questions, conversation titles and labels,” whichever agent the conversation came from.
• Pick one up. Send a message, and “the agent starts a new session in Enjoy and receives the earlier messages, so it can pick up where you left off.”
• Hand it to another lab. Like any conversation in Enjoy, it can move to another agent, so a Claude Code conversation can go on in Codex when one plan runs low. “The new agent gets the conversation so far.”
• Leave the originals alone. “Enjoy reads the conversations without changing them. The originals stay where Claude Code and Codex saved them.”

Price: importing and reading your conversations needs no subscription. For agents to work in your projects, Enjoy is one monthly subscription, and the first seven days are free, with a card to start. It includes your phone and any browser and one computer; each other computer is $9.99 a month, and each teammate you invite needs a subscription of their own. See pricing.

Watch for: “Enjoy imports the text of the messages”: images and attached files become a note, “and the agent’s tool activity isn’t imported.” A continued conversation is a new session given the earlier messages, not the original one. It finds only conversations from “the exact folder the agent worked in,” searches one project at a time, and “Importing is only in the computer app.” It can’t bring back what Claude Code has already deleted. And Enjoy isn’t open source, and it’s a monthly subscription on top of your AI plans once the free week ends.

When to stay with the agent’s own picker

If you use one agent and only lose track of a session now and then, claude --resume or codex resume is free, searches every folder once you widen it, and reopens the original session with its tool history. A viewer’s copied resume command does the same; an import into Enjoy starts a new session instead. Whatever you choose, raise cleanupPeriodDays first if your Claude Code history matters to you, because nothing finds a transcript after it’s deleted.

Look further when you use both agents and want one search across them, when you’d rather browse than type, or when you want an old conversation to carry on with another lab’s agent.

How we compared

We read Anthropic’s Claude Code docs and pricing, OpenAI’s Codex docs and pricing, and the GitHub pages of Claude Code History Viewer, Agent Sessions and claude-history on November 10, 2026, and every one is linked below. We quote each maker’s own words for its limits and leave out what it hasn’t documented. These tools change weekly, so we recheck this guide against its sources at least once a month, and the date at the foot of the page says when we last did.