shelf

Shelf

Folders, bookmarks and full-text search for ChatGPT and Claude conversations. No account, no server, no sync. Everything stays in the browser.

Version 1.0.0 · Manifest V3 · no build step, no dependencies

Why this exists

Both ChatGPT and Claude let you search conversation titles. Neither lets you search what was actually said. Once you have a few hundred conversations, the thing you remember discussing is effectively gone.

The existing extensions in this category mostly require a vendor account before anything works, which means handing a third party a copy of your conversation history. Shelf reads your history in your own browser and writes the index to your own machine. There is nowhere for it to send anything, because there is no server.

Install for local testing

Open chrome://extensions
Turn on Developer mode (top right)
Click Load unpacked and pick this folder
Open https://chatgpt.com or https://claude.ai
The Shelf tab appears on the left edge of the window

First run reads your conversation list, then fetches message bodies in the background at 3 at a time with a 140ms gap, so it never floods the host app.

Keyboard

Ctrl+Shift+F — focus search
Ctrl+Shift+K — show or hide the panel

How it is put together

manifest.json
src/
  lib/
    util.js       shared helpers, the global Shelf namespace, concurrency pool
    store.js      folders, assignments, bookmarks, settings, licence
                  (chrome.storage.local)
    idb.js        the searchable copy of conversations (IndexedDB)
    search.js     tokenizer, scoring, snippet extraction with highlight ranges
  content/
    adapters/
      base.js     the interface every platform implements
      chatgpt.js  ChatGPT
      claude.js   Claude
    panel.js      the injected UI
    panel.css     scoped styles, light and dark
    boot.js       picks the adapter, mounts once, survives SPA navigation
  background/
    service-worker.js   licence verification, opening pages
  popup/          toolbar popup
  options/        settings, licence, backup and restore
  icons/

Content scripts load in order and share one global (window.Shelf), so there is no bundler and no build step. That keeps the Chrome Web Store review simple and means the source you ship is the source you wrote.

Two decisions worth knowing about

The panel is its own element, not a graft onto the host sidebar. Most extensions in this category inject into ChatGPT’s or Claude’s own navigation, which is why they break on every redesign and why two of them installed together fight each other. Shelf renders into a container the host app does not own.

Storage is split, and the index lives in the extension’s own origin. Folder structure is small and goes in chrome.storage.local. Conversation text is large and goes in IndexedDB, owned by the service worker.

That second part matters more than it looks. IndexedDB is scoped per origin, so an index opened from the content script would be one database on chatgpt.com and a different one on claude.ai, with neither able to see the other. Cross-platform folders and cross-platform search would silently not work. The worker owns one database for the whole extension instead, and search runs there too so thousands of conversation bodies never cross the message channel.

Where the data comes from

Each adapter calls the same endpoints the web app itself calls, from the page’s own origin, using the session the user is already signed into. No credentials are read, stored or transmitted, and nothing is proxied through a server.

These are internal endpoints, not a documented public API. They will change. Each adapter is written to return “unavailable” rather than throw, so a change breaks one platform’s indexing rather than the whole extension. This is the main maintenance burden of this product. Budget for it.

Tiers

	Free	Pro
Products	1 of 3	ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini together
Folders and subfolders	2	unlimited
Pinned conversations	3	unlimited
Search results	top 3	all
Full-text search	yes	yes
Accent colour, sort order	no	yes
Backup and restore	no	yes

Pro is 7 USD per month or 49.99 USD once.

The product cap is the lever that matters. Someone who uses only ChatGPT gets a complete, unlimited-search tool for nothing and has little reason to pay, which is fine: they were never going to. Someone who uses two or three hits the wall at exactly the moment the extra value is obvious, and the wall offers a way through rather than just stopping them.

Full-text search is deliberately never limited: it is the reason anyone installs this, and the loudest complaint about the incumbent in this category is that nothing works before you pay. Nobody meets a wall on install either, since the first product opened claims the free slot silently.

Before you publish

Check the name. Search the Chrome Web Store for “Shelf” and confirm no collision. The store listing title should stay Shelf: Folders & Search for ChatGPT and Claude because that is where the search traffic is.
Create the Gumroad product, then replace in src/background/service-worker.js:
- GUMROAD_PRODUCT_ID
- CHECKOUT_URL Until you do, activation returns a clear message instead of failing silently.
Host the privacy policy (see PRIVACY.md) and put the URL in the store listing. It is required for the permissions this extension asks for.
Justify each permission in the dashboard:
- storage, unlimitedStorage — the folder structure and the local index
- tabs — to reach an open ChatGPT or Claude tab from the popup and shortcut
- host permissions for the two products and for the licence check
Screenshots: 1280x800. Lead with a search result showing a highlighted phrase found inside a message body. That is the thing nobody else’s screenshot shows.

Running the tests

node tests/test-search.js        # search: 17 cases
node tests/test-store.js         # folders, tree, limits, backup: 32 cases
node tests/test-xss.js           # escaping: 10 cases
node tests/test-index-client.js  # worker messaging: 14 cases

The escaping tests matter most. Conversation titles are untrusted input rendered into HTML strings, so esc() and markup() are the security boundary.

Known limits

Indexing a very large history takes a few minutes on first run.
A conversation deleted in ChatGPT or Claude stays in the local index until the next full refresh.
Firefox is not supported yet. The adapters would port; the manifest needs work.
There is no sync. That is the trade for having no account. Backup and restore in Settings is the way to move machines.

Support

nottingostore@gmail.com

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