Search

Two different things are called search here, and the difference matters.

The field at the top of the sidebar filters the list you are looking at, by title. It is a way to find a conversation you remember the name of.

Ctrl/Cmd + K opens the other one: it queries the content of every conversation you have and answers with the passages themselves. It is a way to find a conversation you only remember something said in.

Reading the results

Results are grouped by conversation, best match first, and every match gets its own row with the sentence around it and the term marked in it. A conversation that mentions your term eight times offers eight ways in, each landing on the passage rather than at the top.

The arrow keys move between passages, not between conversations: the conversation heading is a grouping, not a stop. Enter opens the selected one, Esc closes.

Typing filters as you go, with a short pause before each query so a fast typist does not fire six searches on the way to one word.

What backs it

Server mode searches SQLite’s FTS5 index, kept per user and rebuilt when a conversation is saved. Ordering is FTS5’s own relevance: distinctive terms, close together, in shorter messages, rank higher.

Several words are AND-ed, and the last one is treated as a prefix so results narrow while you are still typing. Operators are not exposed: -, *, ", NEAR and OR mean something to FTS5, and a stray dash in an ordinary query would turn a search into a syntax error, so every word is passed through as a literal.

Local mode scans the conversations already in the browser and cuts the excerpt itself. No index, no server, same modal, same result shape.

Excerpts are never HTML

A match is marked with private-use code points and turned back into plain text segments at render time. An excerpt is message content, and building HTML out of it would hand any conversation containing markup a way into the page.

Known limitation

A compaction summary is stored as a message, so a conversation that has been compacted can return the same passage twice: once from the original message and once from inside the summary that stands in for it. Teaching the index to skip compaction markers is on the roadmap.