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

# With uv (recommended)
uv tool install claude-compaction-viewer

# With pip
pip install claude-compaction-viewer

# Or run directly without installing
uvx claude-compaction-viewer --scan

Usage

Scan all conversations for compactions

ccv --scan

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

Project                                  Session     Lines Compactions  Tokens In Tokens Out   Duration
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
~/Work/my-project                        a272d8b9…    3086           3       1.8k     262.4k       4.1h
~/Work/other-project                     f359f046…      79           0         36       3.8k       1min

View compaction summaries

ccv --summary ~/.claude/projects/<project>/<session>.jsonl

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

Interactive TUI

ccv

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:

ccv ~/.claude/projects/<project>/<session>.jsonl

How Claude Code stores conversations

Claude Code saves every conversation as a JSONL file at:

~/.claude/projects/<project-path>/<session-uuid>.jsonl

Each line is a JSON object with a type field:

Compaction creates two adjacent lines:

1. A system message with subtype: "compact_boundary" and compactMetadata (trigger type, pre-compaction token count)
2. A user message with isCompactSummary: true containing the structured summary

The conversation continues after the summary. The full history stays in the file — the summary just becomes what's loaded into the active context window going forward.

Development

git clone https://github.com/swyxio/claude-compaction-viewer
cd claude-compaction-viewer
uv sync
uv run ccv --scan

License

MIT