[FEATURE] Desktop app: persist the chosen transcript view (thinking) as the default for new sessions

Problem Statement

In the Claude desktop app on Linux (v1.28929.0), the transcript view mode resets to normal for every new session. There is no way to make thinking the default, so it has to be picked from the dropdown again in each session.

Nothing on disk exposes it as a preference:

• ~/.claude/settings.json and ~/.claude/settings.local.json: no related key
• ~/.claude.json: no related key
• ~/.config/Claude/config.json: only showThinkingSummaries, which governs whether thinking summaries are produced, not which transcript view renders

The mode lives in the renderer's localStorage instead:

strings -a ~/.config/Claude/'Local Storage'/leveldb/*.log \
  | grep -oE 'transcriptMode[A-Za-z]*":[^,]{0,60}'

That shows two keys, a per-session transcriptModeBySession map seeded to normal, and a global transcriptMode that on my machine last held thinking. The global value does not seed new sessions, so the per-session default wins every time.

Proposed Solution

Persist the last chosen transcript mode as the default for new sessions, or add an explicit preference for it (app settings, or a key in ~/.claude/settings.json such as defaultTranscriptMode: "normal" | "thinking").

Alternative Solutions

Editing the leveldb store by hand is not viable. The app holds it open and rewrites it on quit, so the edit is either clobbered or risks corrupting the store.

Priority

Medium

Feature Category

User Interface

Use Case Example

I read the thinking transcript for essentially all work, so the first action in every session is opening the titlebar dropdown and switching modes. Over many short sessions per day that adds up, and it is easy to forget until part of a response has already scrolled past in the wrong view.

Additional Context

App version 1.28929.0, Linux (Ubuntu, kernel 7.0.0-29-generic).