Conversations, History & Branching

1. The Conversations Sidebar

The left-hand sidebar (accessible on mobile via the top-left menu button) houses your complete chat archive.

• New Chat: Instantly creates a clean chat session preserving your active profile.
• Chronological Grouping: Chats are organized into clear time buckets: Today, Yesterday, Previous 7 Days, This Month, and Older.
• Real-time Search: Filter your chat history instantly by title.
• Quick Session Actions: Hover over any session to export or delete it individually.

2. Turn Branching

Branching lets you explore alternative lines of thought without losing previous context.

How it works:

1. Click the branch icon button beneath any assistant response.
2. ZeroChat creates a new independent chat containing the conversation history up to that point.
3. Subsequent messages from the original conversation are omitted in the new branch, allowing you to ask a different follow-up or test an alternative model.
4. The original conversation remains completely intact and accessible from the sidebar.

3. Exporting Conversations

Export your chat sessions into standard formats:

• Full Session JSON: Contains messages, metadata, tool calls, and profile settings. Functions as a 1:1 backup that can be imported back into ZeroChat.
• Markdown (.md): Formatted text ready for Obsidian, GitHub, Notion, or personal wikis, preserving headers, code blocks, tables, and math equations.
• Plain Text (.txt): Lightweight transcript for quick reading and sharing.
• PDF: A print-ready view that can be saved as PDF.

4. Session Import & Safe Purge

Click "Import chat" in the sidebar footer to load any exported ZeroChat .json file.

Imported sessions are validated, sanitized, and stored directly into your browser's IndexedDB database.

Only ZeroChat JSON backups can be imported, and importing is unavailable while a response is being generated.