claude-resurrect

Recover Claude Code sessions abandoned by a crash, reboot, or IDE kill — not just a session browser, but a crash-recovery tool. An interactive TUI picker over everything that was live when things went sideways, with auto-offer on terminal restore.

macOS only (for now). Node ≥ 18.

npx claude-resurrect          # interactive picker over all recoverable sessions → resume the one you pick

Why

Claude Code's --resume lists past sessions, but after a Mac reboot or an IDE crash the sessions that were open in your terminals are easy to lose. claude-resurrect reconstructs them from three sources and unions them:

• reboot mtime-burst — every running claude flushes its transcript at shutdown; files in a tight window before boot were live;
• IDE terminal scrollback — VSCode/Cursor persist each terminal's buffer, which holds the --resume <id> line of idle tabs;
• a live registry — optional hooks record every interactive session and what was cleanly closed (so closed/dropped ones are never re-offered).

It filters out compaction artifacts, temp-dir scratch sessions, and empty ones; shows custom /rename titles; and groups by project.

Use

claude-resurrect               # pick over all recoverable sessions, grouped by project
claude-resurrect --here        # only the current project directory
claude-resurrect --active      # currently-LIVE sessions (a pre-restart backup)
claude-resurrect --grep TERM   # pick among sessions that mention TERM
claude-resurrect 900           # widen the reboot mtime window to 900s

Keys: ↑↓/jk move · enter resume · d drop (never offer again) · r refresh · q quit. The picker auto-refreshes when sessions are resumed/closed in other terminals.

Full crash-recovery (init)

For the complete experience — a live registry, clean-close detection, and auto-open-on-restore — install globally and run init:

npm i -g claude-resurrect
claude-resurrect init --shell

• Adds SessionStart/SessionEnd hooks to ~/.claude/settings.json (maintains the registry + tombstones cleanly-closed sessions).
• --shell adds a block to ~/.zshrc that snapshots live sessions and auto-opens the picker in restored IDE terminals (within 30 min of boot). Set CLAUDE_RESURRECT_OFF=1 to disable.

Reverse it: claude-resurrect init --uninstall. Both files are backed up (*.claude-resurrect.bak) before any change.

How resume works

claude --resume is cwd-scoped, so the picker cds into the session's project directory before resuming, and refuses to re-resume one that's already live in another terminal.

License

MIT