[FEATURE] Recents pane lost after reinstall — should be rebuilt from ~/.claude/projects/ JSONL files

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

After reinstalling the Claude desktop app (Windows), the Recents pane is empty. All conversation history is intact on disk in ~/.claude/projects/, but the Recents index (stored in the Electron Local Storage at AppData\Roaming\Claude\Local Storage\leveldb) was wiped by the reinstall and not reconstructed.

What happened

• The desktop app became unresponsive ("black screen").
• I reinstalled the app.
• On relaunch, the Recents pane showed no previous conversations. I'd had a dozen active and another dozen archived, some of which I've been finding useful to refer back to.
• Investigating AppData\Roaming\Claude\Local Storage\leveldb, all files had timestamps matching the reinstall — the index had been recreated from scratch.
• However, ~/.claude/projects/ contains all conversation JSONL files intact, with correct pre-reinstall timestamps. The data was never lost — only the index pointing to it was.

Proposed Solution

On first launch after install (or whenever the Recents index is empty/missing), the app should scan ~/.claude/projects/ for existing JSONL session files and reconstruct the Recents list from them. This would make Recents resilient to reinstall, app data corruption, or any other event that clears Electron's Local Storage.

At startup, treat ~/.claude/projects/ as the source of truth for session history. The Recents index in Local Storage should be a cache derived from those files, not the primary record. If the cache is absent or empty, rebuild it by scanning the JSONL files (reading e.g. the first and last message of each to extract timestamp, project path, and a title/summary).

Alternative Solutions

Conversations can be resumed via the CLI using claude --resume – but seemingly not within the CLaude app.

Priority

High - Significant impact on productivity

Feature Category

Interactive mode (TUI)

Use Case Example

_No response_

Additional Context

OS: Windows 10 Education 10.0.19045
App version: 2.1.138