Chatbox CE — Session Grouping fork

A fork of Chatbox Community Edition that replaces the flat, ever-growing chat list with a file-explorer-style sidebar: nestable groups, a per-group paginated view, and an AI assistant that can reorganize the whole sidebar through tool calls.

Base: upstream v1.21.1. Personal fork, maintained for personal builds — not affiliated with the upstream project. Same GPLv3 license.

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Why this fork

Chatbox keeps every conversation in one long, time-ordered list. That works for a handful of chats and breaks down once you have hundreds — there is no way to file related sessions together, the only navigation is scroll + search, and the list is a single flat stack with no hierarchy.

This fork adds the missing structure: folders for your chats, with real nesting, drag-and-drop ordering, and an AI manager that can sort things for you.

What it adds

File-explorer sidebar

• Always-on rail on the far left; hovering opens a nested group tree flyout. Clicking a group "enters" it and the main panel shows only that group's direct sessions.
• Up to 4 levels of group nesting (MAX_GROUP_DEPTH = 4).
• Real pagination per group — the per-group panel is backed by a keyset/index-backed query on the DB session-meta store (infinite scroll), not getAll() + slice. It stays fast with thousands of sessions.
• Drag-and-drop (dnd-kit) to reorder groups among their siblings and to reorder sessions within a group, with animated overlays.
• Per-group color, rename, duplicate (clones the group's sessions and direct sub-groups), and delete (sessions fall back to Unassigned).
• Two pinned virtual views, visually separated from real groups:
  • Unassigned — sessions with no group.
  • Starred — a virtual pseudo-group collecting starred sessions in time order. Sessions join by being starred and leave by being un-starred; move/copy/delete are disabled here (it is a view, not a container).

AI Manager session

• A reserved, pinned system session at the bottom of the sidebar that exposes a session-management toolset to the model (only inside this session).
• ~23 model-callable tools: list/move/rename/duplicate/delete sessions and groups, set color/parent, reorder, plus bulk variants (single confirmation per batch) and an auto-organize proposal hook.
• It always reads the complete session set (counts, per-group totals, ids + titles) — no pagination truncation.
• Reading aids for deciding where things go: cached session summaries (generated on demand), bulk_get_summaries (parallel, configurable concurrency with 10→3→1 fallback), and a last-N-messages fallback.
• All destructive actions go through a confirmation modal.

Adaptive session summaries

• The default summary prompt first classifies the conversation type (dev task / Q&A / brainstorm / role-play / consultation / casual) before summarizing, instead of one rigid template.
• Resolution order: per-session prompt → global default prompt → built-in. Both overrides are editable in settings.

Selective export / import

• A dual-layer checkbox tree (groups + sessions) for exporting a chosen subset.
• Import is compatible with the official Chatbox export format (ungrouped sessions land in Unassigned) and with this fork's group format; dangling group references are cleared rather than dropped.

Build & run

Requires Node ≥ 20 and pnpm. From the repo root:

pnpm install
pnpm run dev        # desktop dev (Electron + renderer)
pnpm run build      # production build
pnpm run package    # package for the current OS
pnpm run check      # tsc --noEmit
pnpm exec vitest run # tests

For everything about the base application (providers, models, knowledge base, MCP, platforms), see the upstream project: https://github.com/ChatBoxAI/ChatBox.

License

GPLv3 — see LICENSE. Chatbox and the Chatbox logo are trademarks of their respective owners; this is an independent fork.