How to reopen your Claude Code conversations after restarting your Mac

Claude Code keeps your conversations on your Mac. Here is how to pick them up again after a restart with --continue and --resume, and how to reopen many tabs at once.

Restarting your Mac closes every terminal tab, but your Claude Code conversations are not lost. Claude Code saves each one on your Mac, under ~/.claude/projects/, one folder per project.

Resume one conversation

Conversations belong to the folder you started them in, so go to that folder first:

cd ~/code/my-project
claude --continue       # the most recent conversation in this folder
claude --resume         # choose from a list
claude --resume <id>    # one specific conversation

You can also type /resume inside a running Claude Code session.

When you had many tabs open

The hard part is remembering everything that was open: which folders, which conversations, in which tabs. With eight tabs across four projects, that is a lot of cd and picking from lists.

Alien Desk Pro remembers which conversations were open and in which folders. After a restart it offers to reopen them, each in its own Terminal, iTerm2 or Ghostty tab, in the right folder. You can try Pro free for 14 days.