What is the ~/.claude folder on Mac? Can you delete it?

Where it is

What it is

Claude Code, Anthropic's coding agent for the terminal, keeps its per-user data in ~/.claude. Files you wrote or configured are here: settings.json, a global CLAUDE.md with your instructions, and any custom commands, agents, skills and plugins.

The part that grows is the history. The projects folder holds a transcript of each session, grouped by the folder you ran it in, and there are smaller folders for things like file checkpoints and shell snapshots. Long sessions with large tool output make large transcripts.

Claude Code removes transcripts older than a set number of days by itself. The period can be changed with the cleanupPeriodDays setting in settings.json.

How big it gets

Usually tens to hundreds of MB, and it can reach a few GB after months of heavy use.

How to clear it by hand

1. Run the command below to see which parts are largest. It only reads sizes.
2. Close any running Claude Code sessions.
3. Open ~/.claude/projects in Finder. Each subfolder belongs to one project folder on your Mac. Move the ones you no longer need to the Trash.
4. Keep settings.json, CLAUDE.md and the commands, agents, skills and plugins folders. They are things you wrote or set up, and nothing recreates them.

du -sh ~/.claude/* | sort -hr | head -15

What happens afterwards

Sessions whose transcripts you removed can no longer be resumed or searched. Your projects' own files are not stored here and are not affected. If you delete the whole folder, Claude Code starts again with default settings.

How Diskzy handles it

Diskzy shows ~/.claude on the disk map with the size of each subfolder, and Search can list its largest or oldest files. Anything you remove with Diskzy goes to the Trash first.

Related guides

• .codex~/.codex
• Cursor~/Library/Application Support/Cursor
• .cache~/.cache