Desktop app: No way to remove entries from the "Recent" folders list

Status Open

Maintainer reply None cached

Activity 7 comments · opened Jun 29, 2026

Environment

Claude for Windows 1.15962.1 (1e236d)
OS: Windows 11 Pro 22631

Summary

The project picker chip in the task composer shows a "Recent" folders list, but there is no UI to remove individual entries from it. Old or abandoned project folders accumulate with no way to clean them up.

Repro

Open a folder via the project chip (e.g. via_unet).
Click the chip again -> see via_unet listed under "Recent".
Try to remove it:

Left-click the entry -> only switches to the folder.
Right-click the entry -> only the default Electron context menu (Copy / Select All); no Remove / Forget option.
File menu has no related entry.
Settings (General / Account / Usage / Capabilities / Connectors / Claude Code / Cowork / Desktop app -> General/Extensions/Developer) has no project list management.

Conclusion: there is no in-app way to remove a Recent entry.

Expected

Either a "Remove from Recent" action in the right-click menu of each entry, or a section in Settings to manage the Recent folders list.

Workarounds attempted

Editing %APPDATA%\Claude\config.json - no recent-projects key present.
Searching all non-session files under %APPDATA%\Claude\ for the folder name - no plain-text match.
The list appears to be stored in IndexedDB (%APPDATA%\Claude\IndexedDB\https_claude.ai_0.indexeddb.leveldb\), which is binary and locked while the app is running. Deleting it would wipe other local state, so it isn't a real workaround.

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6 Comments

lelborn · 1 month ago

Hitting this too. My "Recent" list in the project picker has accumulated stale folders (old/renamed local paths) with no way to remove individual entries. Right-clicking only shows the default context menu (Copy/Select All), with no "Remove from Recent" option.

I'm on Mac OS btw. :)

geokao · 1 month ago

+1 — same on macOS. My Recent folders list had grown to 20 entries with no way to remove any of them, so the picker keeps getting longer and less useful. A right-click → "Remove from recents" (or even a cap on the list length) would be great.

NicolasEymael · 1 month ago

In addition to being able to remove folders, the ideal solution would also include an option to mark folders as favorites (pin them), so frequently used projects stay at the top regardless of recency.

katzeye777 · 1 month ago

Adding a concrete harm case: my Recent list has two entries with the same display name — cmw-central /Users/matthewkatz/Claude (correct) and cmw-central /Users/matthewkatz/Calude (a typo of "Claude", from once opening the repo via a mistyped path). They sit right next to each other, look identical at a glance, and there's no way to delete the bad one — so it's not just clutter, it's a footgun: one wrong click lands me in the wrong (nonexistent) path instead of my real repo.

Worth flagging for whoever picks this up: the older ~/.claude.json workaround (#68350) no longer works. I removed the path's key from projects in ~/.claude.json and cleared the app's Local Storage, and the entry still came back on restart — so the list is persisted somewhere else (looks like the detectedProjects store mentioned in #75230), independent of both.

Ask: a per-entry "Remove from recent" (right-click), and ideally auto-pruning of entries whose paths don't exist on disk — the typo/dead-path ones are pure hazard.

lex1182 · 1 month ago

I was able to remove those "recent" folders in Claude Code. I did a combination of the following below. You may try any of the following at your own risk:

Close Claude Code -> Delete any chat sessions that had that working directory included -> Reopen Claude and see if that recent folder is gone (BE WARNED: _This is permanent_)
Close Claude Code -> Rename ~/.claude.json to ~/.claude.json__BCK (if there's another claude.json.backup file, deleted it too) -> Reopen Claude and see if all recent folders are gone, or rename back to normal
Close Claude Code -> Rename ~/.claude/history.jsonl to ~/.claude/history.jsonl __BCK -> Reopen Claude and see if all recent folders are gone, or else rename back to normal
Close Claude Code -> Zip and Backup everything in ~/.claude/sessions -> Reopen Claude and see if all recent folders are gone, or else restore
Close Claude Code -> Zip and Backup everything in %TEMP%\claude -> Reopen Claude and see if all recent folders are gone, or else restore

I didn't do them in this order. I did 2 to 5 first and reopened Claude. And then went with no1 last (because the chat sessions weren't loading up properly after all this deleting). No1 as last step fixed it for me. Maybe someone else can test and confirm the combination required. But my guess is that these folders can't be removed if there's chat sessions attached to them (which makes sense)

vasiltabakov · 29 days ago

Still broken in 1.24012.9 on Windows. The sidebar shows every folder that ever had a session, including one-off folders I'll never open again. Editing ~/.claude.json no longer works - the sidebar is built from the app's internal session store, which users can't reasonably edit. Please restore the show/hide project toggles that used to exist.

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