Feature request: optional timestamps on conversation messages

Summary

Long Claude Code sessions that span multiple hours or days have no way to see when messages were sent. This makes it hard to reconstruct the timeline of decisions, especially when a session crosses a sleep break or context switch.

Proposal

Add optional, configurable timestamps to conversation messages in the Claude Code interface.

• Display a timestamp (or time delta) next to each message
• Off by default to keep the UI clean
• Configurable via settings (e.g., "showTimestamps": true or "showTimestamps": "delta" for relative time)
• Useful for multi-day sessions, pair programming, and reviewing decision history

Use case

I ran a ~12-hour session across two days working on a physics paper and interactive simulator. When reviewing decisions made before vs. after a sleep break, there was no way to tell when anything happened without external context (e.g., timestamps in a text conversation happening in parallel).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code