Local-first · Read-only · macOS
Session Recall keeps one local full-text index of every coding-agent session on your Mac. Eight agents, one search box. Find the turn you half-remember, open it exactly, and hand it back to your agent.
Actual app UI over a synthetic index of demo sessions. The query “reconnect backoff” returns 2 sessions and 5 turns in 1.2 ms; every matched term is highlighted. The sidebar carries the agents, the project filter and the date range.
Indexes sessions from
How it works
Each session is stored as turns — the question you asked and the answer you got — plus, in a
second scope, the process events around them. All of it lives in a single SQLite file you can
move, back up or delete: ~/Library/Application Support/session-recall/index.db.
Full text over prompts and answers, backed by SQLite FTS5 with a trigram tokenizer for Chinese phrases, substrings and code identifiers, falling back to porter for English. Wrap an exact phrase in quotes; multiple terms are AND-ed.
Switch to the process scope and search tool calls, shell commands, stdout and stderr, and the error lines extracted from them. Reasoning is excluded, so results stay about what actually happened.
Every result deep-links to sessionrecall://session/<id>?turn=N with your
terms highlighted. The session page carries the exact resume command and a copyable
Markdown handoff card.
The index is a separate SQLite file. Agent stores are opened read-only and never written to, and sessions never leave the Mac — there is no sync and no account.
Screenshots
Two views of the same index: opening a session at the turn you found, and searching the process output around a failure. Both run over a synthetic index of demo sessions.
cd '/Users/demo/demo-app' && claude --resume — next to
Copy and Copy handoff, so the next prompt starts from the session you found.
timeout against tool calls, commands and
error output — 3 sessions, 3 process rows, 0.7 ms. Each row names the agent, the project
and the date.
Install
Take the Apple silicon build or the Intel build — both are the same app. The packaged app is about 67 MB and ships its own runtime, so nothing else needs installing first.
Session Recall is ad-hoc signed but not notarized, because notarization needs a paid Apple Developer account. macOS therefore stops the first launch and claims the app is damaged. Run this once per copy and it opens normally from then on:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine \
"/Applications/Session Recall.app"
open -a "Session Recall"
# from a clone, for the CLI and MCP server
bun run scan
bun run sr "websocket" --limit 3
bun run mcpThe app scans agent storage on boot and refreshes the index every 90 seconds while it is open. Type the words you remember — quote an exact phrase if you have one.
macOS 11 or later. The packaged app includes its own runtime; Bun 1.3+ is only needed for
the CLI, the MCP server, or building from source.
Index: ~/Library/Application Support/session-recall/index.db
For agents
bun run mcp serves the same index to any MCP client over stdio — no port, no
network. Point your client at the absolute path:
{
"mcpServers": {
"session-recall": {
"command": "bun",
"args": ["run", "/absolute/path/to/session-recall/src/cli.ts", "mcp"]
}
}
}Questions
~/Library/Application Support/session-recall/index.db
and are never uploaded anywhere.
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Session Recall.app" — tells
macOS to trust it from then on.