Desktop: cycle sessions in most-recently-used (MRU) order, or a toggle-last-two-sessions shortcut

Same behavior on Windows, so the platform:macos label understates the scope.

• Claude Code Desktop 1.40609.0, bundled engine 2.1.247 (the same engine version as in the report above), Windows 11 25H2, build 26200. Confirmed 2026-08-30.
• Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab walk the sidebar in positional order here too, so returning to the session you just left costs one press for every session sitting between the two.

Three things worth adding to the request:

There is no user-side workaround on Desktop. The documented keybindings file (~/.claude/keybindings.json) covers the CLI, and Desktop session cycling is not among the documented actions; #84101 reports that Desktop does not read that file at all. Whatever ordering ships is therefore the only ordering available, which raises the value of getting the default right.

This family has been raised before and closed without a decision. #74124 asked for the adjacent mechanism — visit-history Back/Forward session navigation with remappable shortcuts — and was closed as not planned after a stale label. Different traversal model, a history stack rather than an MRU cycle, but the same underlying need: getting back to the session you just left without walking the sidebar.

Codex Desktop already does both. Its Ctrl+Tab cycles tasks by recency, and it renders a switcher overlay while the key is held, listing the open tasks so you can see what you are cycling toward before releasing; I filed openai/codex#33318 against that overlay for an unrelated gap. The two halves compose well: recency makes the common two-session bounce cheap, and the overlay makes longer jumps deliberate instead of blind — a working reference for what this issue asks for.

On shape: exposing MRU as separate next/previous-by-recency actions alongside the existing positional ones would avoid redefining Ctrl+Tab for anyone who prefers browser semantics, and the toggle-last-two behavior then falls out of two presses without needing its own shortcut or setting.

For cross-client context, the identical request is open against another desktop agent client at anomalyco/opencode#44258 — same reasoning, same Windows setup.

Could the platform:macos label be dropped or broadened? The behavior is not platform-specific.

One more constraint worth recording here, because it removes the obvious "just use direct-jump shortcuts instead" answer.

Ctrl+1 … Ctrl+9 jump to a session by its position in the sidebar, counted across projects rather than within one — hold Ctrl and the assigned numbers appear next to the rows, which also makes the ceiling visible. Rows past the ninth get no number and cannot be reached this way at all, and because the count runs across projects, "past the ninth" in practice means everything under the lower projects once a few of them have sessions open. Ctrl+9 is the ninth slot rather than the last session, so there is no browser-style jump-to-the-end either.

That leaves the two keyboard routes between sessions failing in complementary ways:

• Ctrl+Tab walks positionally, so getting back to the session you just left costs one press for every session in between — worst exactly when many sessions are open.
• Ctrl+number is one press regardless of distance, but only addresses the first nine slots — it stops covering the workspace exactly when many sessions are open.

So neither is a workaround for the other, and the gap between them widens with session count. The numbers are also positional, so they move when sessions are opened, closed, or reordered; that makes them unreliable for muscle memory in the same way tab position is.

MRU cycling is the one mechanism in this family whose cost does not grow with the number of open sessions, which is the argument for it over adding more direct-jump slots.

Unchanged in Claude Desktop 2.7032.0.0 on Windows 11 (checked 2026-09-23). Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab still step through sessions in sidebar order, not by recency.

• The Desktop shortcut table still describes them only as "Next or previous session", with no ordering option.
• I found no entry about session-cycling order in the Desktop changelog from 1.40609.0 through 2.7032.0.

Three newer requests ask for the same behaviour:

• #93666: an option to cycle sessions in most-recently-used order
• #91175: Ctrl+Tab / tabs:next switching to the last-used session, in Desktop and the TUI
• #92295: Ctrl+Tab cycling the working set of sessions rather than every session in the sidebar

I'm linking them here so they can be triaged together rather than closed separately.