Cross-client session syncing between VS Code extension and Desktop app

Status Closed — not planned

Maintainer reply None cached

Activity 3 comments · opened May 28, 2026 · closed Jun 28, 2026

Summary

Sessions started in the VS Code extension don't appear in the Claude Desktop app's Code tab, and vice versa. There's no way to start a session in one client and continue it in the other, or to see a unified list of all sessions regardless of where they were started.

Use case

I work across both the VS Code extension (for inline IDE integration) and the Claude Desktop app (for standalone work). I'd like to:

See all my Claude Code sessions in a single list, regardless of which client started them
Start a session in VS Code and pick up where I left off in the Desktop app (and vice versa)

Current behavior

VS Code extension and Desktop app are fully siloed — each only shows sessions it started
Session transcripts all land in ~/.claude/projects/ on disk, but neither client surfaces the other's sessions
The CLI claude --resume can pick up any session, but the GUI clients cannot

Proposed behavior

The Code tab in the Desktop app (and the VS Code extension's session list) should read from the shared ~/.claude/projects/ transcript store and display all sessions
Resuming a session started in a different client should work seamlessly

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3 Comments

github-actions[bot] · 3 months ago

Closing for now — inactive for too long. Please open a new issue if this is still relevant.

hakonhagland · 3 months ago

Adding a +1 with a concrete use case, and a suggestion to narrow the scope so this becomes cheap to ship.

Use case: I regularly start a session in the terminal (claude --resume <id> works great there) and later want to keep working on that exact conversation in the Desktop app. Today I can't — Desktop only lists sessions it created, so the only handoff is /export + manual paste, which is lossy and one-shot.

Suggested narrow scope (same machine only, no cloud sync): rather than full cross-device/account sync, the high-value 90% is just letting Desktop list and resume any session already in ~/.claude/projects/<project>/ for the current working directory. A few things suggest this is a small change rather than a big infrastructure project:

All clients already write transcripts to the same ~/.claude/projects/*.jsonl on disk — the data is already co-located.
claude --resume <id> is already client-agnostic: it happily resumes a session regardless of which client created it. So the resume mechanism itself works cross-client today; the gap is purely that the Desktop UI doesn't surface the other sessions.
#67517 shows the read path is the weak link: Desktop takes a one-time snapshot of the session list at startup and never re-scans, while Chat sessions already sync live cross-process (and cross-device). So the app already has the machinery for this on the Chat side — it just isn't wired up for Code sessions.

Given the number of closed/duplicate requests in this area (#66229, #57210, #56038, #58039, #47926), there's clearly sustained demand. Would the team consider reopening this scoped down to "surface + resume local on-disk sessions in Desktop" as a first step? That alone would cover most of what people are asking for here, without committing to account-scoped sync.

github-actions[bot] · 1 month ago

This issue has been automatically locked since it was closed and has not had any activity for 7 days. If you're experiencing a similar issue, please file a new issue and reference this one if it's relevant.