Search, browse, and re-read your entire VS Code Copilot chat history — locally, read-only, and fully offline.
Every conversation you have with Copilot is silently saved to disk as an undocumented log file inside hash-named folders — effectively unfindable and unreadable. ChatLens turns that pile into a searchable, readable knowledge base, without sending a single byte anywhere.
✨ Features
- 🔎 Full-text search across every chat, in every workspace, from one sidebar
- 🗂️ Workspace & model filters — jump to the project or model you remember
- 💬 Readable transcript viewer — click any result to open the conversation as clean chat bubbles (markdown rendered), not raw JSON
- 🎯 Relevance ranking with highlighted snippets
- 🔄 One-click refresh to re-index after new chats
- 🔒 100% local & read-only — no network calls, nothing leaves your machine
🚀 Usage
- Click the ChatLens icon in the Activity Bar.
- It auto-indexes your Copilot chats.
- Type to search, filter by workspace/model, and click a result to read the full conversation.
⚙️ Settings
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
chatlens.maxIndexKB |
40 |
How much of each transcript to index for search |
chatlens.days |
0 (all) |
Only index sessions from the last N days |
🔒 Privacy
ChatLens reads VS Code's local chat-session storage on your machine and builds an in-memory index. It makes no network requests and never writes to your transcripts. Everything stays on your device.
⚠️ Note
VS Code's chat transcript format is internal and undocumented; ChatLens reconstructs conversations on a best-effort basis and may need updates if the format changes.
Your AI conversations are institutional memory. ChatLens makes them findable.