Quickstart

Install Chronicle and reach your first time-travel — clicking a message and watching your code snap back to how it looked at that moment — in about five minutes.

Chronicle's core trick is simple to experience but hard to forget: it lines up every message in an AI coding session against your Git history, so any point in the conversation becomes a window into the exact state of your code. Here's the whole loop in a few seconds:

Chronicle — Playback● LIVE

User

Assistant

Tool Call

User

Assistant

server/git.js

1export function commitAt(dir, ts) {

2 // TODO: pick a commit

2 const hash = git(dir, ['rev-list', '-1']);

3 return describeCommit(dir, hash);

4}

5 

6function treeAt(dir, commit) {

Click any message in your sessionChronicle rewinds your code to that exact momentToggle the diff to see what changedScrub the timeline like a video

No account, no API key, no network — Chronicle reads the logs your AI tools already wrote to disk, entirely on your machine.

1 · Install

macOS — download: grab the app from getchronicle.dev. One button, auto-detecting Apple Silicon vs Intel. Builds are signed and notarized, so they open with no Gatekeeper warning.

macOS — Homebrew:

brew tap chizhangucb/chronicle
brew install --cask chronicle

Run from source (any platform — Windows/Linux installers aren't built yet):

npm install
npm run dev        # dev server → http://localhost:4173

After install, Chronicle keeps itself up to date — new signed releases download in the background and offer a one-click Relaunch to update. See Installation for run modes, requirements, and details.

2 · Pick a Git-backed project

Chronicle time-travels through Git commits, so choose a session whose project is a Git repository with some history. The more commits it has, the more precisely Chronicle can reconstruct code between messages. A project with no repo still plays back the conversation — you just won't get the code-snapshot pane.

3 · Import a session

1. Launch Chronicle (or npm run dev → http://localhost:4173). You'll land on the Projects home — empty on first run.
2. Click + Import Sessions. Chronicle scans the standard log locations for all six supported tools and shows what it found. Pick a source — Claude Code is the richest if you have it.
3. The wizard lists sessions with NEW / Partial / Imported badges (new ones are pre-selected). Hit Start Import — it's read-only, so your original logs are never touched.

Importing sessions covers the full flow and all six tools.

4 · Time-travel

1. Back on the home screen, click a project card, then click any session.
2. The session opens on Overview; switch to Playback from the left rail (or press ⌘2).
3. Click any message. The middle pane rebuilds your file tree and file contents as they were at that moment, resolved to the nearest preceding commit. Changed files are green-dotted and auto-selected. Press D for the diff.
4. Drag along the TimberLine (bottom) to scrub the whole session and watch the code evolve commit by commit.

That's the "aha." Time travel explains everything you're looking at.

Local-first: Every step ran entirely on your machine. Chronicle made no LLM calls and no cloud requests — it parsed local logs into a local SQLite database and reconstructed code from your own Git history. Nothing about viewing a session leaves your laptop.

Where to go next

• Missing a source, or want to understand the badges? → Importing sessions
• The full playback / diff / timeline reference → Time travel
• What the Overview tab tells you (cost, active duration, context) → Session insights

Related

• Installation — run modes, requirements, and auto-update in depth.
• Importing sessions — the import wizard, the six tools, and read-only guarantees.
• Time travel — playback mode, snapshots, diff, and the TimberLine in depth.