ctools

Try it now
uvx --from ctxttools cdir

Then install it
uv tool install ctxttools

ctools is a suite of simple tools for navigating through the sessions of the most popular LLM agents and coding tools. It allows you to search your history, transfer conversations, filter them, and even share them among machines and users.

It supports Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex, Pi, Hermes, Goose, Kilo, FreeBuff, Cline, and omp.

Your work travels with you. The source is never touched, so it's a true copy. And when the destination is on another machine, it's just ccopy opencode/ses_abc123 ssh://chris@remote/codex. It pulls the agent's storage over your normal ssh (the remote only needs sshd and tar).

Here's an example:

I look for mentions of snake game in opencode using cgrep

$ cgrep "snake game" opencode
opencode/ses_a1d1a5a4df984ee698cab4a7:1:user: make a simple snake game in python
opencode/ses_a1d1a5a4df984ee698cab4a7:2:assistant: I'll make a terminal-based snake game using `curses` (standard library, no dependencies).
opencode/ses_a1d1a5a4df984ee698cab4a7:3:assistant: Done — `snake.py` is a terminal snake game using Python's built-in `curses` module (no dependencies).

cool let's look at the status of that session using cdir

$ cdir -l opencode/ses_a1d1a5a4df984ee698cab4a7
  ID                            NAME                                MODIFIED            SIZE  MSGS  PATH
  ses_a1d1a5a4df984ee698cab4a7  make a simple snake game in python  2026-10-07 16:56  2.7 KB     3  /home/chris/.local/share/opencode

  1 session(s)

Alright let's copy that session from opencode into pi!

$ ccopy opencode/ses_a1d1a5a4df984ee698cab4a7 pi
Copied 3 message(s) from opencode/ses_a1d1a5a4df984ee698cab4a7 to a new pi session: e357f435-f813-463a-b313-f97f1051f3cb
Resume it with:
  pi --session e357f435-f813-463a-b313-f97f1051f3cb

As you can see, these are unix-friendly tools using simple paradigms that you are already familiar with.

1. cgrep — find it in your past conversations

You already know the answer is in a session you had months ago. You just don't remember which one. cgrep searches every session you ever had, across every agent you use, with a plain regex:

$ cgrep -i "ssl"
claude-code/a351eedf:142:assistant: … the TLS handshake fails with SSL wrong version number …
opencode/ses_000d460f:16:user: ok graflex has an erorr in the check. i see this: … [[SSL: WRONG_VERSION_NUMBER] …
opencode/ses_000d460f:34:assistant: Found it. Root cause: `_check_host` (graflex/__init__.py:128) tries `http`, and …

No agent argument? It searches every installed agent.

2. ccopy — move your project from one tool to another

Switched from opencode to Claude Code mid-project? You don't have to start from zero. Copy the whole conversation — context, decisions, the lot — into a fresh session in the other tool:

$ ccopy opencode/ses_abc123 claude-code
Copied 128 message(s) from opencode/ses_abc123 to a new claude-code session: 1a2b3c
Resume it with:
  claude-code --resume 1a2b3c

Tools

Every tool takes --version. The session-mover tools (ccopy, cextract, cconnect, crm) also take --verbose for structured logging. Each tool's full flag reference, output formats, and examples live in its docs/ page — the table above is just the 30-second version.

How it works

ctools is a substrate for moving memory between context windows. Cross-platform, agent-agnostic, designed like a bus.

Two stages: extraction and filtering.

• A strategy extracts concepts from a conversation. It defines what counts as a concept and how to find it: regex patterns, LLM extraction, whatever. Different strategies produce different ontologies from the same conversation, because context is contestable.
• A filter selects which extracted concepts reach a destination. It's a binary classifier: pass through or filter out. One concept list can fan out to many destinations, each with its own filter. A coding agent gets coding preferences, a security agent gets security constraints, a PM agent gets goals, all from the same source.

graph LR
    SRC["source session"] --> STRAT["strategy<br/>(extraction)"]
    STRAT --> CONCEPTS["concept list"]
    CONCEPTS --> FA["filter A"]
    CONCEPTS --> FB["filter B"]
    CONCEPTS --> FC["filter C"]
    FA --> DEST_A["destination A"]
    FB --> DEST_B["destination B"]
    FC --> DEST_C["destination C"]

Context windows are endpoints: opencode, Claude Code, Codex, Pi. They all speak different protocols, but they all consume the same packets. See cextract for the concept packet format, strategies, and the filter (JSON-RPC) protocol.

The problem

You talk to LLMs all day. Over weeks, you build up a set of constraints, preferences, and goals. These live in your conversations as system messages. They are valuable. They are also trapped.

Say you have been working with opencode for a month. You have refined your coding style through dozens of sessions. Now you start a new Claude Code project and you want those same preferences. You could copy them by hand. Or you could cextract them out and cextract them back in, or copy the whole conversation across with ccopy. Either way, your memory travels with you.

Supported endpoints

Run cdir to see which endpoints are found on your system and where they store data.

Every endpoint is one class in ctools/agents.py. The base Agent defines the whole interface the tools use — sessions(), messages(), raw_messages(), lines(), inject_system(), inject_toolcall(), remove_messages(), create_session() — and the storage-shaped subclasses (JsonAgent, JsonlAgent, SqliteAgent) implement most of it. Adding an endpoint means writing one subclass and adding it to AGENT_CLASSES; no command changes.

from ctools.agents import JsonlAgent, Session

class MyAgent(JsonlAgent):
    name = 'myagent'
    description = 'My Coding Agent'
    session_pattern = 'sessions/**/*.jsonl'

    @classmethod
    def default_base_path(cls):
        return Path.home() / '.myagent'

    def sessions(self):
        ...

Anything the storage cannot do — pi's session trees cannot be rewritten in place — raises UnsupportedOperation instead of being silently skipped.

MCP server

There is an MCP server for use from Claude, opencode, Cursor, or anything else that speaks MCP.

Tools: list_agents, list_sessions, search_sessions, export_session, extract_concepts, copy_concepts, get_session_concepts.

Add to your MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ctools": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/ctools/ctools_mcp.py"]
    }
  }
}

Installation

pip install ctxttools

For MCP server support:

pip install ctxttools[mcp]

Library

Works as a Python library too.

from ctools.agents import REGISTRY, OpencodeAgent, SessionNotFound
from ctools.lib import get_formatter
from ctools.cgrep import grep_session
from ctools.cextract import extract_concepts_from_messages
from ctools.cdu import count_tokens, get_session_tokens
from ctools.filterlib import JSONRPCFilter, load_filter
from ctools.log import configure_logging, get_logger

Everything goes through an agent:

from ctools.agents import REGISTRY

agent = REGISTRY['opencode']
for session in agent.sessions():
    print(session.id, session.name, session.size)

for message in agent.messages('ses_abc123'):
    print(message.role, message.content)

Point an agent somewhere else by constructing it with a path:

from ctools.agents import OpencodeAgent

agent = OpencodeAgent('/backup/opencode')

Credits

ctools was extracted from Gab n' Go. It's named after GNU mtools, which does the same thing for DOS floppies — because your context window is about the size of a DOS-floppy. The flag habits are GNU's too: --version, -1, -S, -u, and the rest behave the way you'd expect.