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Tabs and History

Each chat tab is a separate conversation with its own agent, model, and message history. History persists across restarts — closing a tab is a decision to lose it, not an accident.

Tabs​

Create a tab: Ctrl+N or + in the tab bar.

Each tab has:

  • A bound agent (picker at the top)
  • A bound model (picker at the top)
  • Its own message stream
  • Its own checkpoint timeline
  • Its own tab name (editable; defaults to the first user message)

Tabs are independent — a tool call in tab A doesn't affect tab B. You can have a planner tab, a coder tab, and a reviewer tab running at once on the same project.

Tab management​

ActionShortcut
New tabCtrl+N
Close tabCtrl+W
Next tabCtrl+Tab
Previous tabCtrl+Shift+Tab
Rename tabdouble-click tab title
Pin tabright-click → Pin

Pinned tabs can't be closed with Ctrl+W — protects important conversations from accidental close.

History​

Every tab is backed by a persisted chat thread. Settings → History shows all past threads across all projects, searchable:

  • By text in messages.
  • By date.
  • By agent.
  • By project.
  • By checkpoint activity (threads that had rollbacks).

Reopen a thread from history to continue an old conversation with full context — all previous turns, tool calls, and checkpoints are restored.

Session vs thread​

A session is a single time you had a chat tab open. A thread can span many sessions — you closed the tab yesterday, reopened it today, it's the same thread. The thread's ID is stable; session IDs are not.

This matters for:

  • Memory — the thread-level persistent memory sees all sessions in the thread.
  • Replay — replaying a thread replays all sessions combined.
  • Analytics — "how many sessions on this thread" is different from "how many threads".

Thread length limits​

Threads don't have a hard cap, but:

  • Compression kicks in around 30-50 turns depending on turn size.
  • Eventually the compression becomes lossy enough that starting a new thread (and importing the important bits into persistent memory) is better than continuing.
  • Replay fidelity decreases with heavily compressed threads.

Rule of thumb: when a thread is making the agent visibly confused about earlier decisions, it's time to start fresh.

Deleting history​

Two levels of delete:

  • Archive a thread — removes it from the main list but keeps the data. Recoverable.
  • Delete a thread — removes the data permanently. Not recoverable.

For compliance reasons, the event log entries referenced by a deleted thread remain (append-only) but lose their chat metadata. If strict deletion is required, use the admin tool: codebolt admin purge-thread <id>.

Exporting​

codebolt chat export <thread-id> --format markdown > thread.md
codebolt chat export <thread-id> --format json > thread.json

Markdown is human-readable; JSON preserves full structure including tool calls and checkpoints.

See also​