CB's ideas scratchpad

This "issue" is used for sharing my backlog of ideas for future claude-code-log features.
A bit like @daaain's TODO list in the README.md (there is some synergy!).
It's more of a scratchpad, really. Feel free to comment. If something needs more discussion, I can open a dedicated issue.

Filtering

Older proposal:

• --depth option, symbolic: #287
  • "session": only the session summaries (should work on a folder; may also work on a single .jsonl if we also try to get the summary from the other sessions, as the summary message is not in the session .jsonl itself); PR287 only --depth session
  • "user": stop at the user prompts; → #26 --detail user PR287 --depth user
  • "assistant": stop at the assistant answers; "assistant+": also include "thinking" → #96 --detail minimal (no thinking) PR287 --depth assistant
  • "subassistant": stop at the subassistant answers in the sidechains; → --detail low PR287 --depth agent
  • "tools": stop at the tools level (no sidechains); "tools-"/"shallow": only the information gathering ones (Task, WebSearch); → --detail low PR287 --depth tool (default)
  • 5 / "full": all the way, i.e., as we have now → --detail full PR287 --depth hook

Older proposal:

• (?) --filter-out, --filter-in with fine-grained control (e.g., --filter-out thinking, --filter-out tools + --filter-in edit)
  • the --depth option above would translate to filters:
    • --depth session = --filter-out user,command,assistant,thinking,system,tools,sub-assistant,sub-thinking,sub-tools
    • --depth user = --filter-out assistant,thinking,system,tools,sub-assistant,sub-thinking,sub-tools
    • --depth assistant = --filter-out thinking,system,tools,sub-assistant,sub-thinking,sub-tools
    • --depth assistant+ = --filter-out system,tools,sub-assistant,sub-thinking,sub-tools
    • --depth tools = --filter-out sub-assistant,sub-thinking,sub-tools
    • --depth shallow = --filter-out thinking,sub-assistant,sub-thinking,sub-tools + --filter-in task,websearch
    • --depth subassistant = --filter-out sub-thinking,sub-tools
    • --depth subassistant+ = --filter-out sub-tools

In light of #96, I wonder if we shouldn't simply have these two options to modulate what's hard-coded by default in the "low" detail mode...

The two most useful modes:

• "full" (what we have now) to fully understand what was going on by seeing everything that happened → --detail full

• "shallow" to have an overview of what happened at the information processing/gathering level, without the redundancy between thinking and assistant, and the details of what the tools did → --detail low

• (?) --skip to start rendering at a given offset in the .jsonl, useful for deltas (generated output filename would contain the range: '...-start-end.fmt'); --skip could even take the previously generated file as input;

Rendering

HTML and Markdown

Structure

• pagination support: break a session in chunks delimited by n User messages

  • we can use that mode in Markdown previews in the TUI, so that it remains usable for long sessions
    • partially there, but problematic (see #84)

• -o should be respected when processing the projects directory as well; it's not a good idea to create our logs below ~/.claude itself! Rather use $XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR or ~/Documents, + /claude-code-log; if only for Bug #1972762 “Firefox and Chromium snaps preventing apps and dev...” : Bugs : snapd... (see #151)

• -o is currently only halfway respected when processing one project directory:

  • only the combined transcript will take the specified name (fails when -o directory is given)
  • the individual sessions are still created below ~/.claude/projects/<projectdir>; instead, they should be placed below the targeted directory (or siblings to -o file) (see #151)

• combined transcript mode can be... too much (my current one for claude-code-log is now 146MB...); we already have --no-individual-sessions, so we should also have --no-combined-transcript (mutually exclusive; unless we want to use that combination for only doing a cache sync) => combined transcript is paginated now, so this is less urgent (well, with #59), but it would be nice to have only individual sessions (and those could be paginated as well, see above)

  • we could also have the "positive" ones, mutually exclusive: --individual-sessions, --combined-transcript

Content

• In the session summary, a session entry should include the start and end dates of the messages it contains, "(from - to)" suffix

  • but see #85 for the bigger picture

• --user=plain|markdown|md - how to interpret user input: possible values:

  • "plain": i.e., what we have now and the safe default;
  • "md" or "markdown": render as Markdown, a.k.a., "Trust me, I know what I'm doing" mode; -u as shortcut for --user=markdown;
  • "auto": auto-detect if it's a nicely formatted Markdown text or a copy/pasted error stack... delux version would auto-wrap such things in a raw code block (future) → #119 ("auto" behavior is the default, always on)

Impl note: ideas for the "auto" mode welcome!

• Specialized rendering for WebSearch tool; #83 / #87

• Differentiate a "Reject" error from a real error - there's some user prompt there that should "stand out":

• Better support for hooks:
  Even without the alignment glitch => #89, we can do better: pair them by uuid/parentUuid, and a dedicated renderer.

  Excerpt from the corresponding input .jsonl

  {
    "type": "user",
    "message": {
      "role": "user",
      "content": "Stop hook feedback:\nYou've got mail! Use /clmail:read 10 to read message #10 and proceed (reply if requested)."
    },
    "isMeta": true,
    "uuid": "e9edc0d4-81b9-4d5f-9ad5-be56e588479e", // same
  },
  {
    "parentUuid": "e9edc0d4-81b9-4d5f-9ad5-be56e588479e", // same
    "type": "system",
    "subtype": "stop_hook_summary",
    "hookCount": 1,
    "hookInfos": [
      {
        "command": "callback"
      }
    ],
    "hookErrors": [
      "You've got mail! Use /clmail:read 10 to read message #10 and proceed (reply if requested)."
    ],
    "preventedContinuation": false,
    "stopReason": "",
    "hasOutput": true,
    "level": "suggestion",
  }
  

→ #149

• Show transitions for cwd (now in ... directory) and gitBranch (now on ... branch) → #94

HTML only

• Pygmentize old/new before diff? Easy for the red/green background, but what about intra-line highlights?

Markdown only

• User command, System info, Bash output in Markdown: support ANSI to Markdown (on the model of ANSI to HTML, only simpler, just bold and italics)

• EnterPlanMode: render as Markdown instead of code block ... or skip altogether

Others

• --format json - nothing like the "original" .jsonl, but a serialization of the high-level TemplateMessage objects → #36

Styling

• Fix glitches as they're discovered (still quite a few)

  • Inverted colors for bottom bar: → #89
  • see #153

• --compact option, for compact style:

  • for HTML:
    • For tools, something similar to
    • Less lines visible in <details><summary> (or none?);
    • Avoid the dates? (only as tooltips?)
    • Expand/collapse on the side? (my original idea, but never implemented)
  • for Markdown:
    • For tools, something similar to #44's "chat" mode (no headers) → #114
    • Every tool Read/Edit/Write/Bash output in <details>
      • --no-details to suppress those

• too large spacing between "▼▼" in Chrome: fix with letter-spacing, though not too much as then this would break FF → #153

The TUI

claude-code-log --tui

Project list

• The projects are listed in some order... not sure I can figure out what order it is without looking at the code...; would be great if we had "last mod" and "created" date columns, and that we could sort according to name, or these dates
• (?) Selecting a project with 's' - makes sense, but I keep hitting "[Enter]" ;-) Would be nice to have that as an alias!
• [ESC] alias to 'q'

Project view / Session list

• Better navigation: 'q' / '[ESC]' should go to project selection if we're coming from project selection, not quit immediately ('Q' could do that, but that saves one repeated keystroke...) → '[ESC]' alias to 'p', goes back to project list, 'q' still exits immediately, that's OK...

Markdown preview

• 't' doesn't do anything (supposed to toggle the outline view) → fixed
• '[Enter]' alias to 'v' (configurable?)

File system

• The FS caches were located in ~/.claude/projects/*/cache, and the new cache is located in ~/.claude/projects/*/cache'.db is currently in ~/.claude/projects/`.
• If we keep that location, we should at least name it ~/.claude/projects/claude-code-log-cache.db~ → now ~/.claude/projects/claude-code-log-cache.db which is OK.

We should have our own location. I'm no fan of ~/.claude-code-log, but as I wrote about, we should really put our generated output (.md and .html) in ~/Documents/ClaudeCodeLog (or ~/Documents/ClaudeCodeLog), we could also put the cache.db there.

Known issues

• ⛔ Pre-process "thinking" Markdown, typically missing required new lines, like in this example:
  ...but this is hopeless, the newlines are missing from the input:

  {"type":"thinking","thinking":"The user is right - the worker approach is over-engineering. The TUI is still blocking during generation anyway, and they don't want users to do other things during generation. A simpler approach is just to show a notification before starting the generation and then show the result when done.Let me revert to a simpler approach:\n1. Show \"Rendering Markdown...\" notification\n2. Do the synchronous generation3. Show success/error notification when doneThis is simpler and matches what the user wants.", ...
  

  → 2. Do the synchronous generation3. Show success/error (no space between "generation" and "3." in the input, therefore, not much we could do about it.

This issue is a scratchpad containing many unrelated proposals, with no single file, test, or entry point identified. Choose one unchecked idea and move it into a dedicated issue with a defined scope, implementation location, and completion criteria before starting work.