I’m a big user of Claude Code, their CLI is AMAZONG, you can even paste images of outputs and it’ll parse it.

Needless to say, I’m a heavy tmux user, and I usually have several sessions windows and pane open, with plentiful of Claude CLI sessions in place.

The Problem

When exiting Claude Code, it shows a resume command, BUT, once the terminal clears, it’s gone. I wanted a way to automatically pick up where I left off.

The Solution

Note:

You’ll need jq for this to work. zsh is not mandatory, doing something similar in bash is trivial.

Two small pieces wired together:

1. A SessionEnd Hook (~/.claude/settings.json)

Claude Code supports hooks; shell commands that fire on lifecycle events. I added a SessionEnd hook that writes the resume command to .claude_session in the current working directory on every exit:

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"hooks": {
  "SessionEnd": [
    {
      "matcher": "",
      "hooks": [
        {
          "type": "command",
          "command": "jq -r '\"echo \\\"claude --resume \" + .session_id + \"\\\" > \" + .cwd + \"/.claude_session\"' | sh"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

2. A Shell Function (c)

A tiny zsh function that checks for the saved session file in the current directory:

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c() {
  if [ -f .claude_session ]; then
    local cmd
    cmd=$(cat .claude_session)
    rm -f .claude_session
    eval "$cmd"
  else
    claude "$@"
  fi
}

How It Works

• Exit Claude Code -> the hook saves the session ID to .claude_session
• Run c from the same directory -> it resumes right where you left off
• Run c again (or with arguments) -> it starts a fresh session, since the file was consumed
• Multiple projects = multiple sessions, no conflicts

Total time: about two minutes of Claude hacking. Now I only lose context in meetings.