[FEATURE] Desktop: replace the delete-session confirmation modal with a recoverable "Recently deleted" view
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
Deleting a session in the desktop sidebar requires confirming a modal every time. The modal is there to prevent accidental loss, but it charges that cost on every delete to protect against the rare mistake — so pruning a history list means dismissing one modal per session.
Confirmation dialogs are also weak protection in this position. When a dialog appears on every single delete, it gets clicked through reflexively, so it stops being a real check and just becomes friction. The result is a delete action that is both annoying to use and not actually safe.
Proposed Solution
Make delete instant and undoable rather than slow and irreversible — the pattern used by Finder, Gmail, and Photos:
- Deleting a session removes it from the sidebar immediately, with no modal.
- An undo affordance appears briefly — a toast with "Undo", and/or
Cmd+Z. - Deleted sessions move to a "Recently deleted" view where they can be restored, with permanent removal available explicitly (a "Delete permanently" action, automatic expiry after N days, or both).
Most of the machinery for this seems to exist already. Sessions carry an isArchived flag and the session list can be queried with archived entries included, so there is already a notion of "present but hidden from the default view." Delete also does not appear to remove the transcript from disk: in one project directory I have 11 .jsonl transcripts under ~/.claude/projects/<encoded-dir>/ but only 2 sessions visible in the sidebar. The data needed for a restore is already on disk — what's missing is a UI path back to it.
Alternative Solutions
_No response_
Priority
Medium - Would be very helpful
Feature Category
Other
Use Case Example
- I finish a week of work across several short-lived sessions — a few experiments, a couple of one-off questions, some that went nowhere.
- I want to clear them out so the sidebar shows only work I'm still tracking.
- Today each removal is: open the row's "⋮" menu, choose Delete, confirm the modal. Six sessions means six modals, and if I misjudge one there is no way back.
- With this change I delete them in six keystrokes, and if I remove the wrong one I hit Undo or pull it out of "Recently deleted."
Additional Context
_No response_