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A session is the persisted state of one ongoing conversation with the agent. It lives in .docwriter/docwriter.db and persists across restarts. Reopening DocWriter resumes the same session — the agent remembers prior turns, prior tool calls, and prior context within limits. You usually don’t think about sessions. They’re transparent. There are two cases where they become visible.

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Starting a fresh session

Pass --new-session on the CLI:
DocWriter clears the persisted session ID at startup. The next agent turn creates a new conversation. Files, tabs, rules, hooks, and comments are not affected — only the agent’s conversational memory. Useful when:
  • The agent has dug itself into a hole and you want a clean slate.
  • You’re switching context to a different writing project on the same workspace.
  • You want the agent’s behavior to be reproducible from a fresh state (e.g., for screenshots or testing).
You can also clear the session from inside DocWriter via the Settings menu, New session item. Same effect, no restart.

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The transcript viewer

The history pane on the right shows the current turn’s tool calls live. To browse prior turns — every user message, every Claude response, every tool call and result — open the Transcript button at the top of the history pane. The transcript viewer is a separate read-only window over the same SQLite-backed session data. It has:
  • Per-event filters (user messages, assistant text, tool calls, hook runs, errors).
  • Free-text search across the whole transcript.
  • Expandable tool-call entries showing the inputs (the agent’s arguments) and outputs (what the tool returned).
The transcript is the system of record for what the agent did. If something looks wrong in the history pane and you want to dig deeper, the transcript is where you go.

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Sessions and hooks

Two hook events fire on session boundaries:
  • SessionStart runs when a new agent session begins (first turn after --new-session, or when a fresh workspace is opened).
  • SessionEnd runs when the session is cleared or the server shuts down cleanly.
Common uses:
See Hook events for the full event list and Hooks for the hook configuration UI.

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What the agent remembers across sessions

Within a session, the agent has the full Claude Agent SDK conversation context: prior user prompts, prior tool calls, prior reasoning. Between sessions (after --new-session), all of that is gone. What persists regardless of session — because they live in DocWriter’s own state, not the SDK’s conversation:
  • Your tab files (essay.md, paper/main.tex, etc.).
  • Writing rules and writing references.
  • Hooks.
  • Open comment threads.
  • Pending agent reviews.
  • The recent-actions LRU for the inline feedback popup.
  • The CRDT history (so undo/redo survives restarts).
A fresh session is just a fresh conversation. Your work doesn’t move.