Claude Dossier

A native GTK4 / Adwaita desktop app for browsing, searching, and resuming your Claude Code session history.

About

Claude Dossier reads the session history written by Claude Code into ~/.claude/projects/ and presents it as a clean, searchable sidebar of projects and conversations. Click a session to read the full transcript, search across all content with full-text indexing, resume a session directly from the app, or view and edit the CLAUDE.md configuration files that guide Claude's behaviour in each project.

Features

• Sidebar tree of projects grouped by directory, sorted by recent activity
• Full conversation viewer with markdown rendering
• Full-text search (SQLite FTS5) across all session content, built incrementally in the background
• Hover-preview with auto-restore to the last committed selection
• Resume any session in a terminal with one click (claude --resume <id>)
• Export conversations to Markdown
• View and edit the CLAUDE.md inheritance chain for each project
• Keyboard-friendly, no Electron

Developer Documentation

See docs/DATA_FORMATS.md for detailed schema documentation, known bugs, and data preservation guidance for each supported format.

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• GTK 4 and libadwaita 1.4+ (system libraries)
• PyGObject — the Python GTK bindings (python3-gi)

PyGObject must come from your system package manager, not pip.

Distro	Command
Debian / Ubuntu	sudo apt install python3-gi gir1.2-gtk-4.0 gir1.2-adw-1
Fedora	sudo dnf install python3-gobject gtk4 libadwaita
Arch	sudo pacman -S python-gobject gtk4 libadwaita
macOS (Homebrew)	brew install pygobject3 gtk4 libadwaita

Running from source

git clone https://github.com/Fede654/ClaudeDossier.git
cd ClaudeDossier
python3 -m venv .venv --system-site-packages  # gives the venv access to system GTK bindings
source .venv/bin/activate
./run-dev.sh

Building and installing

Requires meson and ninja:

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install meson ninja-build
# Fedora
sudo dnf install meson ninja-build
# Arch
sudo pacman -S meson ninja

Then build and install system-wide:

meson setup builddir --prefix=/usr/local
meson compile -C builddir
sudo meson install -C builddir

The dossier command will be available on your PATH and the app will appear in your application grid.

To uninstall:

sudo ninja -C builddir uninstall

Running tests

source .venv/bin/activate
pip install pytest
GSETTINGS_BACKEND=memory pytest tests/ -v

Forked from

Apostrophe — a GTK4 Markdown editor by Wolf Vollprecht and Manuel Genovés. The GTK4 / Adwaita application shell, build system, and resource pipeline were reused; all editor functionality has been replaced.