Default Claude Project (chat without software context)
The pre-created Claude project that lives at ~/Claude — Omniscio's general-purpose workspace for anything not tied to a codebase: how to find it, how to start a chat in it, and what unpinning, deleting or moving it does.
What it is
The Claude project is a pre-created project that ships with Omniscio and lives at ~/Claude on your computer. It's your "general purpose" workspace — the equivalent of chatting with claude.ai in the browser, except inside Omniscio with full sidebar, voice, Super Prompts, artifact sharing, and everything else. Use it for anything that isn't tied to a specific codebase: asking Claude to draft emails, plan a trip, summarize a PDF, write a blog post, brainstorm ideas. It's auto-created on first launch so it's always ready, it shows up pinned at the top of the projects sidebar — directly below the Inbox row with the official Claude logomark icon (warm orange starburst), and it's also the default home for any Super Prompt you launch. Because it's pinned, adding new projects won't push Claude down — it stays in first position until you unpin it. Unlike virtual projects (Gmail, SMS, Skills, etc.), this is a real filesystem folder — sessions you start here can read and write files in ~/Claude just like any other project.
Where to find it
How to use it
- Find it in the sidebar. It's pinned at the top — directly below the Inbox row — with the orange Claude logomark, labeled Claude. Click it to open.
- Start a session. Press Ctrl+T (or N on its own) or click the + in the sessions sidebar to spawn a new chat. No setup needed — Omniscio will launch Claude Code with
~/Claudeas the working directory. - Use it with Super Prompts. Press Ctrl+Shift+K anywhere to open the Super Prompts picker — selecting any prompt spawns a session in the Claude project with that prompt pre-loaded. It's the fastest way to kick off "help me plan X" or "coach me through Y" conversations.
- Copy the folder path. Click the three-dot menu on the Claude project card → Copy Path. Omniscio resolves the sentinel to your actual path (e.g.
C:\Users\you\Claude) and copies that to the clipboard — not the internal__claude__string. - Unpin it if you'd rather it sat with your other projects. Right-click → Unpin (or use the three-dot menu's pin toggle). It moves out of the pinned slot and into the regular project list at its current display position. The pin is a normal user preference — Omniscio will not re-pin Claude on later launches once you've unpinned it.
- Delete it if you don't want it at all. Right-click → Remove Project (or use the three-dot menu). It soft-deletes like any other project and won't re-create itself on the next launch. Your
~/Claudefolder on disk stays untouched — only the Omniscio reference is removed. If you want it back, manually add~/Claudeas a regular project.
How it behaves
How it works
At startup, /src/main/index.ts calls ensureClaudeProject() from /src/main/services/claude-project.ts right after the database is ready. The function creates ~/Claude on disk if missing (fs.mkdirSync(..., { recursive: true })) and inserts a project row with folderPath = '__claude__' — the CLAUDE_PROJECT_ID sentinel constant in /src/shared/types.ts. Immediately after creation it calls pinProject(created.id, true) so the new row lands in the sidebar's pinned section. The dedup check in /src/main/db/queries-projects/projects.ts (projectExistsByFolderPath) intentionally includes soft-deleted rows so a user deletion is respected across restarts. At session-launch time, resolveProjectWorkDir() maps the sentinel back to join(homedir(), 'Claude') before Claude Code spawns, so the CLI always sees a real path. Unlike __gmail__, __sms__, __skills__, etc., __claude__ is not in VIRTUAL_FOLDER_PATHS — it's a real project with full session/file-explorer/git semantics. The sidebar icon renders via /src/renderer/src/components/ui/ClaudeIcon.tsx with the text-claude Tailwind color when folderPath === CLAUDE_PROJECT_ID — see /src/renderer/src/components/ui/ProjectIcon.tsx. Copy Path in the three-dot menu (/src/renderer/src/features/dashboard/ProjectListItem.tsx) detects the sentinel and calls IPC.PROJECT_RESOLVE_PATH to get the expanded home-relative path before writing to the clipboard. The folder location is hardcoded — there's no setting to move it somewhere else.
For users who installed Omniscio before this feature shipped, migration v111 (/src/main/db/database.ts) is a one-time data-only backfill: it sets is_pinned = 1 on the existing __claude__ row (if any) and reseeds its display_order to MIN(display_order across all non-deleted projects) - 1 so it sorts before every other pinned project. Schema-gated — runs once. If you later unpin Claude, Omniscio will not re-pin it on later launches. Naturally a no-op when no __claude__ row exists (you removed it before upgrading, or never had one).
Related
- use-super-prompts.md — the picker always launches sessions inside the Claude project
- use-skills.md — skills activate across all projects, including this one
Last verified 2026-09-23