claude-peek

Inspect and tail Claude Code session transcripts from the terminal. List every session, slice any conversation, and watch another window live as it works.

Claude Code persists every session to disk as a streaming JSONL file under ~/.claude/projects/<cwd>/<session-id>.jsonl. claude-peek turns that raw stream into something a human can read, diff, and follow.

Why

• Two windows at once. See what the other Claude is doing without switching terminals.
• Reconstruct the arc. Re-read a long session by user prompts only, strip tool noise, or tail the last 20 %.
• Observability. Track context token usage over a session, spot auto-compactions, audit what was asked.
• Zero friction. No MCP server, no DB, no cloud — just the files Claude already wrote.

Install

pip install claude-peek
# or, from source:
git clone https://github.com/frapercan/claude-peek && cd claude-peek && pip install -e .

Python 3.10+. Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Quick start

# List the 25 most recent sessions with context size
claude-peek list

# Peek at a session by session-id prefix
claude-peek show 7cba6520

# Last 30 % of a session
claude-peek show 7cba6520 --percent 30

# Only the user prompts (strip tool calls and thinking)
claude-peek show 7cba6520 --prompts-only

# Follow another session in real time
claude-peek follow 7cba6520

# Token / context trajectory
claude-peek stats 7cba6520

Commands

list

claude-peek list [--limit N] [--cwd PATTERN] [--active] [--json]

Lists recent sessions with:

• age (human-readable)
• context size at last turn (input + cache_read + cache_creation tokens)
• working directory
• session id prefix
• last user prompt preview

Flags:

• --active — only sessions modified in the last 5 minutes (probably live).
• --cwd Thesis — substring match on the working directory.
• --json — machine-readable output for piping.

show

claude-peek show <session> [--percent N | --tail N | --before-prompt K | --full]
                           [--prompts-only] [--no-thinking] [--no-tools]
                           [--format pretty|markdown|json]

Render a slice of a session:

• --percent 30 — last 30 % of events.
• --tail 50 — last 50 events.
• --before-prompt 5 — everything up to and including the 5th user prompt.
• --full — entire transcript.

Filters:

• --prompts-only — only user prompts + assistant text, no tool calls.
• --no-thinking — hide [thinking] blocks.
• --no-tools — hide tool calls and tool results.

Output formats:

• pretty (default) — ANSI-coloured terminal output via rich.
• markdown — portable, copy-pasteable into docs.
• json — structured events, one per line.

follow

claude-peek follow <session> [--from-start] [--prompts-only]

Tail the session live using filesystem notifications (watchfiles). Cheap — no polling spin. Ctrl-C to exit.

stats

claude-peek stats <session> [--json]

Shows the context trajectory, prompt count, auto-compaction events, total output tokens and average response time.

search

claude-peek search "regex" [--in-cwd PATTERN] [--limit N]

Grep across all sessions and print matching prompts with their session id, timestamp, and context size.

Session identifiers

Anywhere a <session> is expected you can pass:

• An absolute path to the .jsonl.
• Just the session id (7cba6520-cb8b-4bd2-b246-b1617433c4c5).
• A prefix (7cba6520) — unambiguous prefixes resolve automatically.
• - to read from stdin (for pipelines).

Output format

Every rendered event carries a timestamp, a direction, and the content:

00:40:25 ▶ user
    es optimo?
00:40:33 ◀ claude
    [thinking]
00:40:34 ◀ claude
    [→ Read] {"file_path": ".../go_prediction.py"}
00:40:34 ▶ user
    [← tool_result] 1  from __future__ import annotations...

With --format markdown:

### 00:40:25 — user

es optimo?

### 00:40:33 — claude

_[thinking]_

### 00:40:34 — claude (tool use)

**Read** `{"file_path": ".../go_prediction.py"}`

Performance

• Streaming parser. Large JSONLs (100 MB+) are read line-by-line — memory footprint is O(1) in file size for most operations.
• Indexed discovery. list reads only the metadata needed to rank sessions and never loads message bodies it doesn't need to display.
• follow uses filesystem notifications (via watchfiles → inotify / FSEvents / ReadDirectoryChangesW), not a sleep loop.

Configuration

An optional config at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/claude-peek/config.toml (defaults to ~/.config/claude-peek/config.toml) can set:

# Where Claude Code stores sessions. Normally auto-detected.
projects_dir = "~/.claude/projects"

[list]
limit = 25
show_cwd = true

[show]
default_slice = "tail:50"
hide_thinking = false

Any flag on the CLI overrides the config.

Development

git clone https://github.com/frapercan/claude-peek
cd claude-peek
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pre-commit install
pytest

Quality gates:

ruff check .
ruff format --check .
mypy src
pytest --cov

License

MIT © 2026 Francisco Miguel Pérez Canales