What is Collins?

Collins is a native Linux desktop app that gives your Claude Code sessions a proper home.

As for the name — straight from the README:

My wife keeps referring to Claude as Collins by mistake. So now when she asks me if I'm talking to Collins, I can say yes.

Collins is a fork of agent-session-manager by Máté Molnár — see the original project's website for the app it grew out of. All credit for the original goes there; the fork is GPL-3.0 like the original.

If you use a coding agent daily, you accumulate dozens of sessions scattered across every project you touch. They live as JSONL transcripts named by UUID (Claude Code, for instance, stores them under ~/.claude/projects/) — there's no overview, no way to name them, and no quick way to tell which one was which. The agent's own --resume only shows a picker for the current directory.

This app fixes that. It scans every session on your machine, presents them in a searchable sidebar grouped by project, auto-generates a short title for each one, lets you name and star the ones that matter, and opens any of them in an embedded terminal tab that resumes it right where it last worked — re-attaching to sessions that are still running in the background.

Unofficial community tool

Collins is an independent community project, not affiliated with or endorsed by any agent vendor (including Anthropic). It is strictly read-only with respect to your agents' data — names, favorites, and all app state live in ~/.config/collins/. Your transcripts are never modified.

Why use it?

• One place for everything. Every session, every project — sessions newest first, projects in your own order (drag a project header to rearrange) — instead of UUID-named files and per-directory pickers.
• Human-readable. Every session gets an auto-generated title; rename a3b2152e… to “JWT auth” yourself, star your daily drivers, add an emoji to a tab.
• Work in parallel. Open several sessions as tabs, each with its own secondary shell panel. Sidebar badges and desktop notifications tell you when a background session has finished — or background a session (/bg) and re-attach later.
• Stay oriented. Search the sidebar, search a terminal's scrollback, peek at a session's recent messages before resuming it, and keep an eye on your Claude subscription usage under the session list.

How it compares

Coding agents are terminal programs, and you can absolutely keep using them bare. Collins is a layer on top — it doesn't replace the CLI, it launches and organizes it:

	Bare --resume	Collins
See all sessions across projects	❌	✅
Custom names & favorites	❌	✅
Multiple sessions side by side	Manual terminals	✅ Tabs
"Which session was this?"	Read the UUID	✅ Preview, details, peek
Finished-in-the-background alerts	❌	✅ Notifications

What's next?

Head to Getting Started to install it, or browse the full Features.