Chronicle (Universal Chat Connector)

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Why · CLI Mechanics · Setup Wizard · Tool Catalog · Installation · Auto-Save · Tests · Comparison · FAQ · License

Chronicle is a production-grade Model Context Protocol (MCP) server designed to sync, clean, format, and index local artificial intelligence chat transcripts. By bridging the gap between local editor history and large language model contexts, Chronicle allows agents to search, compare, retrieve, and reference past conversation logs. It features optimized token-saving heuristics that compress code blocks and limit message lengths, reducing context window utilization by up to 40 percent.

Key Architectural Capabilities

Format Normalization Engine

AI providers and editor clients save conversation logs in diverse formats. Chronicle normalizes these structures into a standard role-and-content message format:

• ChatGPT Exports: ChatGPT exports conversation histories in recursive mapping node structures. Chronicle traverses and flattens these maps, sorts messages chronologically by creation timestamp, and extracts the plain-text message threads.
• Claude Exports: Claude structures messages as flat lists nested under the chat_messages field. Chronicle parses these lists, maps custom sender roles (such as human and assistant) to standard roles, and cleans the text strings.
• Generic and Markdown Formats: Chronicle includes parsers for flat JSON message lists (such as Cline or Continue) and structured Markdown logs (mapping headers like User and Assistant to message boundaries).

Context Token Optimization

Large chat logs can quickly exhaust context windows and increase API costs. Chronicle implements proactive token-saving mechanisms:

• Code Block Summarization: Automatically replaces verbose code blocks with metadata summaries indicating the programming language and line count. This behavior can be disabled on demand to read full code snippets.
• Length Limiting: Truncates extremely long individual messages at a configurable character threshold, appending a notice that the user can re-run the tool with expanded limits if necessary.

Context Window Token Savings Graph

To verify these savings, we executed multi-turn conversation benchmarks. The graph below displays total token usage over a sequence of message turns:

By condensing repetitive syntax and large raw code snippets, Chronicle achieves up to 40 percent token savings, directly lowering API usage costs and preventing context-window exhaustion.

Hybrid Splitting & BM25 Scoring Search Engine

To make workspace searches extremely sharp and retrieve context-aware answers, Chronicle incorporates a state-of-the-art retrieval pipeline:

• Hybrid Document Splitting: Slices long conversations into logical parts at indexing time. Splits are triggered temporally if a gap of more than 1800 seconds (30 minutes) occurs between consecutive messages, or lexically if the Jaccard similarity of vocabulary sliding groups of 4 messages drops below 0.12. Each split is stored and queried as a virtual document (filename__chunk_idx).
• Okapi BM25 Scorer: Replaces naive keyword matching and raw TF-IDF with Okapi BM25 scoring (k1 = 1.5 and b = 0.85). The parameter b = 0.85 enforces an aggressive length penalty, which ensures long, rambling chat logs do not overshadow short, precise bug fixes.
• Handoff Receipts Prioritization: Integrates a direct tool to save compact agent state files documenting modified paths, commitments, skipped tests, and next actions. Active handoff receipts are automatically prioritized and bubbled to the very top of search results.

Command Line Interface Mechanics

The cli.py file serves as the system's entry point, registering a unified chronicle command on the system path via the pyproject.toml configuration (chronicle = "cli:main").

1. Interactive Setup Wizard

Chronicle features an interactive, zero-dependency TTY setup wizard. Running chronicle setup or executing chronicle without arguments in an interactive terminal starts the setup flow:

[!TIP] The setup wizard is styled with a premium purple theme, supporting arrow-key navigation, spacebar toggles, inline input editing, and real-time path validation!

Keyboard Navigation & Controls

Use the following controls when interacting with the select menu:

Wizard Phases & Actions

The wizard guides you through the following phases:

[!IMPORTANT] HOW TO USE THE WIZARD — A STEP-BY-STEP SHOWCASE GUIDE

1. Start the Process: Launch the wizard with chronicle setup in your terminal.
2. Split Monolithic Files: Paste the path to your exported conversations.json (from ChatGPT or Claude). This splits them into clean individual threads inside your chats folder.
3. Define Your Chats Directory: Keep the default ~/universal-chats folder or type a custom path.
4. Select Your Target IDEs:
   • Press Down Arrow to scroll down to VS Code, Trae, etc.
   • Press Space to toggle selections.
   • If you select Antigravity, checking it will automatically expand sub-choices (Antigravity IDE, Antigravity 2.0, Antigravity CLI) right underneath!
   • Scroll down to Other (Enter custom entry) and type any system-specific folder name to add emerging editors.
   • Real-time Path Validation: If the custom configuration path parent doesn't exist, a warning alerts you at the bottom: ⚠ App/IDE "<name>" was not found on your system.. Erase it with Backspace or type a valid path to proceed.
5. Complete and Launch: Press Enter to write the JSON configuration file for all selected apps. The Live Environment Dashboard will display a complete summary of your workspace configs.

chronicle setup

── Chronicle Archive Setup ─────────────────────────────────────
Do you want to split a single conversations.json file?
Enter path to export file (or press ENTER to skip): 

Enter path to folder containing your conversations [Default: ~/universal-chats]: 
✓ Using existing storage directory: /Users/username/universal-chats
Successfully set chats directory to: /Users/username/universal-chats