A long chat extension for ChatGPT

Tvara is a Chrome extension for ChatGPT conversations that have grown long. It keeps a long chat responsive, lets you jump to any message in it, and keeps a copy of your ChatGPT history on your own computer, where you can search it and export it.

Why a long ChatGPT conversation starts to lag

Every message ChatGPT writes stays part of the page: paragraphs, code blocks, tables, maths. Hundreds of turns in, the browser has to re-measure all of it while you type, so the input box stutters, scrolling jumps and new answers stream slowly. ChatGPT copes by unloading older messages, which is also why Ctrl+F stops finding things you remember reading. Why long chats get slow explains it in full.

What Tvara adds to ChatGPT

• Speed engine. Messages outside the screen are put to sleep and wake as you scroll back to them. Nothing is deleted, and the popup shows how many are asleep right now.
• Minimap. A thin strip on the right edge with one mark per message, yours and ChatGPT's in different shades. Hover for a preview, click to jump there, however far back it is.
• Outline and in-chat search. A table of contents built from your prompts and the headings in the answers, and search across the whole conversation, including messages that are asleep.
• Real send times. The time each ChatGPT message was actually sent, read from the page itself without a network request.
• Chat Card. Hover a chat in the ChatGPT sidebar to see how many messages it holds and when you last opened it, before you open it.
• Plan and usage. Your plan and the usage figures ChatGPT publishes. Codex usage is labelled as Codex, so it is never mistaken for your chat allowance, and a figure ChatGPT does not publish reads "not reported" rather than a guess.

On ChatGPT every one of these is free.

Your ChatGPT history, kept on your computer

After you install it, Tvara copies your ChatGPT history into a local archive in the background. The first copy usually takes five to ten minutes, and longer for a very large history. If a chat is deleted on ChatGPT, your copy stays until you decide what to do with it. You can export the whole archive at any time, free, as a readable web page, a spreadsheet or JSON.

Searching every archived chat at once (Total Recall), encrypted backups and Context Bridge, which carries context from an old chat into a new prompt, are part of Pro: $1 once, on up to five devices.

Private by design

No chat text, title or prompt is sent to Tvara. The only server is the licence issuer, and it never sees a conversation. The privacy policy lists every connection the extension makes.