Reading and searching sessions
A JSONL transcript contains everything that happened, in an order and a shape designed for a program rather than a person. The reading view puts it back into the form it had on screen.
What gets reconstructed
Tool calls paired with their results
In the file, a call and its result are separate records, sometimes many lines apart, linked by an id. Shown apart they are unreadable. Shown together, you can see what the agent asked for and what came back.
Thinking blocks, collapsed until you want them
Extended thinking is often longer than the answer. It is preserved and folded, and you can expand it per message or for the whole session at once.
Diffs rendered as diffs
When a file-edit result carries structured patch data, it becomes a real diff with line numbers and syntax highlighting instead of a block of escaped text. The Claude Code page shows what that data looks like on disk.
Images back inline
Some agents store pasted screenshots as base64 and others as separate media files. Both render in place, in the message that contained them.
Mermaid diagrams, tables and math
Anything the agent emitted as Markdown is rendered as Markdown.
Finding a message
⌘⇧F opens global search. It runs across every project and every agent at once. Selecting a result opens that session, scrolls to the exact message and flashes it so you can see where you landed.
⌘F searches inside whatever is currently open, and ⌘G and ⌘⇧G step through the matches.
Jump to a prompt
Long sessions are mostly agent output. The prompt list strips all of it away and shows only what you typed, in order, as a compact list. It is usually the fastest way to find the moment a session went wrong. Pick one and the view scrolls to it.
Views history
Sessions you have read recently stay in a history list, per project, with search and favourites. Reopening yesterday's session does not mean finding it again.
Nothing is written back
Reading a session never modifies the file. The app opens transcripts read-only, and the only writes it ever makes to agent data are the ones you explicitly ask for: renaming a session, or moving one to the trash.