Claude Desktop
Claude Desktop has two kinds of sessions, and Hoku handles them differently.
Cowork sessions
Section titled “Cowork sessions”Found automatically. Claude Desktop keeps a small metadata file for each Cowork session on your Mac. Hoku reads, read-only, only these fields:
- title and first message
- when it was created and last active
- the folders you selected
- model
- account.
It skips archived sessions.
Live state: limited. Claude Desktop doesn’t expose whether a Cowork session is working or waiting. Hoku only knows whether Claude Desktop is running and when the session’s file last changed:
| Last change | Hoku shows |
|---|---|
| under 90 seconds ago | Working (low confidence) |
| under 30 minutes ago | Unknown |
| longer ago | Offline (low confidence) |
A Cowork session never appears in Needs You, because Hoku can’t know when it’s waiting on you.
Opening: Open in Claude Cowork opens the session in Claude Desktop. The link Hoku uses was checked against Claude Desktop’s own code and opens without warnings, but it’s not a documented feature, so a future Claude Desktop version could change it.
By hand only. Claude chats are stored on claude.ai, not on your Mac. The only local traces are browser caches next to sign-in data, and reading those wouldn’t be safe or reliable, so Hoku doesn’t. To track a chat, add it by pasting its link: a https://claude.ai/chat/… address, a claude:// link or the chat’s ID. You give it a title, because titles are on claude.ai too.
Live state: none. Chats are always Unknown.
Opening: Open conversation in Claude opens the chat in Claude Desktop, or on claude.ai in your browser if Claude Desktop isn’t installed.
Account
Section titled “Account”Claude Desktop has no status command, so Hoku uses what claude auth status (from Claude Code) reports as the hint for your Claude account. Hoku never reads Claude Desktop’s sign-in or configuration files.