chat-timestamps

Chat Timestamps for Claude Code

See exactly when every message in your Claude Code session happened — as an on-demand timeline or live on each message — privately, and without spending tokens.

Claude Code doesn't show times on messages. In a long or multi-day session you can't tell whether an exchange was five minutes or three days ago, how long a build ran, or what you were doing before lunch. The timing is already recorded in your local session files — this plugin surfaces it, cleanly.

--- Message Timeline ---

────────  Tuesday, 16 June 2026  ────────
  10:42  You     start the auth refactor
  10:43  Claude  On it, reading the module.
          ⋯ 4h 12m later ⋯
  14:55  Claude  Done after a long-running build.
────────  Wednesday, 17 June 2026  ────────
  11:03  You     add tests now
  11:05  Claude  Adding tests for the new logic.

What you get

• 🕑 /timestamps timeline — your conversation with a time on every turn, day dividers for multi-day sessions, and idle-gap markers (⋯ 4h 12m later ⋯) that show where time jumped.
• ⚡ Live inline timestamps (optional, 0 tokens) — a dim [HH:MM:SS] on each assistant message as it streams. It's display-only, so it never enters the transcript or Claude's context and costs nothing.
• 🧠 Time-aware Claude (optional) — let Claude know how long since your last message and how long the session has run, for reasoning like "the DNS TTL was 5h and 3h have passed — still cached."
• 🔒 Local & ground-truth — reads only the session files Claude Code already writes on your machine. Times come from the recorded data, so they stay correct even when a self-reported clock would drift. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Install

Recommended — plugin marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add s-a-s-k-i-a/claude-code-timestamps
/plugin install chat-timestamps@chat-timestamps

Restart Claude Code. /timestamps is now available, and the plugin auto-updates on future releases.

git clone https://github.com/s-a-s-k-i-a/claude-code-timestamps.git \
  ~/.claude/plugins/chat-timestamps

{ "plugins": ["~/.claude/plugins/chat-timestamps"] }

Use it

1. See the timeline

/timestamps              # last 20 conversation turns
/timestamps 50           # last 50
/timestamps 5            # last 5

Add any of these words to tweak the view (combine freely, e.g. /timestamps 50 tools seconds):

2. Turn on live inline timestamps (free)

Show the time on each assistant message as it appears:

/timestamps inline on      # enable
/timestamps inline off     # disable
/timestamps inline         # show current state

[10:42:03] Both workers are active...
[10:47:12] gc-694 finished, gc-695 still running...

This uses Claude Code's display-only MessageDisplay hook: the marker is drawn on screen only, never enters the transcript or Claude's context, and costs zero tokens. Your choice is remembered across plugin updates. (Experimental — see Compatibility.)

3. Make Claude time-aware (optional)

If you want Claude itself to reason about elapsed time during long-running work, enable the timing hook before starting Claude Code:

export CLAUDE_TIMESTAMPS_INJECT=on

Each turn, one hidden line is added to Claude's context (your visible prompt is untouched):

[session timing] now 2026-06-18 10:05 CEST; last assistant reply 3m ago; session started 09:39 (25m ago).

This is the only feature that uses tokens, so it's off by default. Remove the variable (or set =off) to disable it again.

Zero-token timeline (run it in your own terminal)

/timestamps is a slash command, so it goes through the model and costs a small amount of (Haiku) tokens. If you want the timeline with no tokens at all, run the parser directly from your shell — it finds the right transcript itself:

python3 ~/.claude/plugins/chat-timestamps/scripts/parse-transcript.py --cwd "$PWD" 50

Or use the bundled helper (auto-detects the Python launcher):

bash ~/.claude/plugins/chat-timestamps/scripts/timeline.sh 50 --seconds
# handy alias:
alias cct='bash ~/.claude/plugins/chat-timestamps/scripts/timeline.sh'

No agent is involved, so it's instant and free. Adjust the path to wherever the plugin lives (manual installs: ~/.claude/plugins/chat-timestamps; marketplace installs sit under ~/.claude/plugins/ — find it via /plugin). (Idea via #8.)