Show HN: Wallfacer – A terminal session manager for Claude Code, and more

A terminal session manager for Claude Code, Cursor CLI, Kiro CLI and Codex — see every AI coding session you've ever started, then name, tag, group, search, resume, or delete them, from a full-screen browser or straight from the command line.

Why

Claude Code stores every conversation as an untitled JSONL file under ~/.claude/projects/, keyed by whatever directory you were in. Kiro CLI does much the same in a single flat ~/.kiro/sessions/cli/ folder, Cursor CLI buries each chat in a hash-named directory under ~/.cursor/chats/, and Codex files its rollouts by date under ~/.codex/sessions/. After a few weeks you have dozens of transcripts, across four agents, that you can't tell apart and no way to find the one you need.

wallfacer indexes them all — read-only, it never touches the agents' files — and keeps your titles, tags, and projects in its own local SQLite database.

Features

• One view of everything — every session, from every directory and every agent, sorted by recency
• Organize — rename sessions, tag them, group them into projects
• Search — across titles, first prompts, directories, projects, and tags
• Launch & resume — start new sessions or jump back into old ones, from anywhere
• Multi-agent — Claude Code, Cursor CLI, Kiro CLI and Codex side by side; pick the agent when you start a session, filter by it afterwards
• Safe deletes — rm moves to trash; only --purge is permanent
• TUI and CLI — a full-screen browser for humans, subcommands + --json for scripts
• Extensible — agents are pluggable adapters; opencode is on the roadmap

Install

With Homebrew, on macOS or Linux:

The formula lives in this repository instead of a separate homebrew-wallfacer tap, which is the only reason the tap needs its URL spelled out. After that, brew upgrade wallfacer works as usual.

Or with Go:

Requires Go 1.22+. Pre-built binaries are on the releases page; building from source is covered in the development guide.

Two ways to use it

wallfacer is one binary with two front ends, and which one you get depends on whether you pass a subcommand:

They are not separate tools and there is nothing to switch between: both read and write the same SQLite index, so a session you tag in the browser is immediately findable by wallfacer list --tag, and vice versa. Anything the TUI can do, a subcommand can do too.

(If stdout isn't a terminal — wallfacer | less, or inside a script — the bare command prints help instead of opening the browser.)

Quick start

Open the browser and work from there:

Or drive it from the shell:

The TUI — wallfacer

Bare wallfacer opens a full-screen session browser: a list on the left, and a detail pane on the right showing everything wallfacer show prints for whatever is highlighted.

Every row shows its project, tags, directory, age and agent — the same metadata wallfacer list prints. Below ~100 columns the detail pane steps aside and the list takes the full width.

The agent step comes first and is a one-line picker: ←/→ or a digit to choose, enter to go on, esc to back out. Claude Code is preselected, and the step is skipped entirely if only one adapter is registered.

The CLI — wallfacer <command>

Every subcommand is one-shot: it runs, prints, and exits. Same index as the browser.

<ref> is an ID prefix (resume 5f2) or an exact title (resume "smoke test") — ambiguous references list the candidates instead of guessing. Sessions started outside wallfacer are picked up automatically; there's no import step.

How it works

wallfacer scans ~/.claude/projects/, ~/.cursor/chats/, ~/.kiro/sessions/cli/ and ~/.codex/sessions/, reading just the head of each session file for its working directory, timestamps, and first prompt (the automatic title). Every agent's listing carries the agent type, so wallfacer list shows an AGENT column and --agent narrows to a case-insensitive substring such as kiro or cursor. Your metadata lives in SQLite at ~/.local/share/wallfacer/ — delete it and you lose only the overlay, never a conversation. Sync is incremental, so it stays fast with hundreds of sessions.

rm moves a session to wallfacer's trash. For agents that spread one session over several files — Kiro CLI writes a transcript plus a metadata sidecar, prompt history and a scratch directory, and Cursor CLI splits a chat between its own directory and a transcript filed under the project — the whole set travels together, so a deleted session doesn't linger in the agent's own session picker.

Once a day the browser asks GitHub whether a newer release exists and, if so, mentions it once on its footer; subcommands repeat that cached answer on stderr, so it never lands in --json output or a pipe. Nothing ever waits for it: the lookup belongs to the browser because it is the front end that outlives a network round trip, and a subcommand only reads the cached answer — a file read, no network — so an update that lands late simply shows up the next time you run wallfacer. The cache lives in the data dir, and WALLFACER_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 turns the whole thing off.

Other agents plug in through a small adapter interface — see docs/adding-an-agent.md.

Roadmap

• Adapters for Claude Code, Cursor CLI, Kiro CLI and Codex
• Adapter for opencode
• A preferred-agent setting, so the picker's default is yours to choose
• Full-text search across session content (SQLite FTS5)
• wallfacer restore (un-trash from the CLI)
• Export a session transcript to Markdown
• Stats (sessions per project/week, disk usage)
• Desktop app — sessions in a sidebar, embedded terminal, multiple tabs (Wails + xterm.js on top of the same Go internals)

Contributing

See the development guide for building, testing, and releasing. Contributions welcome — especially new agent adapters.

License

MIT

The name is borrowed from the Wallfacers of Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest — people entrusted with plans too sprawling for anyone else to follow.