Claude Compaction Viewer

Claude Code Compaction Viewer

A TUI and CLI tool for inspecting Claude Code conversation history and compaction events.

What is compaction?

When a Claude Code session runs long, the context window fills up. Rather than crashing or losing everything, Claude Code performs compaction: it inserts a boundary marker in the conversation, generates a structured summary of everything before it, and continues with the summary replacing the full history in the active context.

The full conversation is preserved on disk in JSONL files at ~/.claude/projects/. This tool lets you see exactly what happened:

- Where compaction boundaries were inserted
- What the compressed summary contains (the "outcome" of compaction)
- How many tokens were in context before each compaction triggered
- Whether compaction was auto-triggered or manual (/compact)

Inspired by Tal Raviv's article on doing "brain surgery" on Claude Code.

Install

Usage

Scan all conversations for compactions

Prints a table of every Claude Code conversation across all your projects, highlighting which ones have compaction events:

View compaction summaries

Prints full details for each compaction event — the trigger, token count, and the complete summary text that Claude sees after compaction.

Interactive TUI

Launches a full terminal UI:

- Left sidebar: tree of all Claude Code projects and conversation files
- Stats bar: message counts, token usage, model, duration
- Compaction bar: highlighted summary of all compaction events
- Message table: scrollable list of every message (user, assistant, tool calls, system)
- Detail panel: full content of selected message with metadata

TUI Keybindings

You can also open a specific file directly:

How Claude Code stores conversations

Claude Code saves every conversation as a…