How to Resume a Claude Code Session: --continue vs --resume

Yes, you can resume any Claude Code session: claude --continue reopens the most recent conversation in the current folder, and claude --resume opens a picker with all of them. Every session is saved to your disk automatically as you work — closing the terminal loses nothing.

I'm Evgeny, and this was my first genuine 'wait, it remembers?' moment with Claude Code. A session is a saved conversation tied to a project folder — Claude's memory of everything you discussed, decided, and built together. Losing it felt like firing a contractor mid-renovation and hiring an amnesiac twin. Good news: you almost never lose it. Here's the full toolkit.

1How to continue the last session in Claude Code

One flag. Open your terminal in the project folder and run claude --continue — Claude comes back with the full context of your most recent conversation in that directory. This is the command for the 90% case: you closed the laptop yesterday, you're resuming today.

claude --continue

2Claude Code list sessions: finding an older conversation

That's what claude --resume is for: with no arguments it opens the interactive session picker, listing your conversations with their name or first prompt, time since last activity, message count, and git branch. Inside a running session, /resume does the same — it lets you switch to a different conversation without restarting. If you know the session's name, skip the menu: claude --resume <name> jumps straight to it, and a session ID works there too.

Claude Code resume session by ID or pull request

By default the picker shows sessions from the current folder, but it widens easily: Ctrl+A shows every project on the machine, Ctrl+W shows all worktrees of the repository, and Ctrl+B filters to the current git branch. And if a task started life as a pull request, there's a dedicated trick: claude --from-pr <number> brings back the session linked to that PR — no archaeology required.

claude --resume
  ↑/↓   navigate sessions
  Space preview the conversation
  Ctrl+R rename the highlighted session
  Ctrl+A show sessions from all projects
  type anything — search
  Enter resume

3Does Claude Code resume the session after a limit is reached?

Yes. Sessions are written continuously to local transcript files as you work, so a usage limit, a crash, or an accidentally closed terminal doesn't erase the conversation. When you're back, claude --continue picks it up. The real expiry is time: transcripts live at ~/.claude/projects and are removed after 30 days by default — the cleanupPeriodDays setting changes that. If a conversation matters long-term, run /export to save it as a plain-text file.

Since v2.1.234, Claude Code goes further on claude.ai accounts: it continues your session automatically when the usage limit resets, so work resumes the moment your allocation refreshes — no need to reopen anything. If you'd rather decide yourself when to continue, turn it off in /config ('Continue automatically at usage limit').

4How to pause and resume a Claude Code session

Pausing requires zero ceremony — there is no save button because saving is constant. Even /clear doesn't destroy a conversation: it starts a fresh context while the previous chat stays saved and resumable through /resume. The craft is in resuming deliberately. My routine for parallel work, fully copy-pasteable:

What does --fork-session do?

That --fork-session trick deserves a sentence more: forking copies the conversation so far and switches you into the copy. It's how you A/B-test approaches without contaminating the main timeline — and forked sessions appear grouped under their parent in the picker. One warning from the docs worth repeating: resuming the same session in two terminals at once without forking interleaves both into one transcript. Chaos. Fork instead.

Kicker: people lose hours re-explaining context to a fresh Claude that their previous Claude already knew. Two flags — --continue and --resume — and a naming habit make that loss extinct. Name today's session before you do anything else.