SessionSearch

Session Search

ClawDE indexes all session messages in a SQLite FTS5 virtual table, enabling fast full-text search across your entire conversation history.

Keyboard Shortcut

Cmd+K (macOS) / Ctrl+K (Windows/Linux) — opens the global search overlay from anywhere in the desktop app.

Search UI

The search bar opens as a modal dialog and searches as you type (200 ms debounce). Results are ranked by BM25 relevance and show:

• The message role icon (user / assistant)
• A text snippet with the matching phrase
• The date and time of the message
• Arrow keys to navigate, Enter to open, Escape to close

Clicking a result navigates to that session and scrolls to the relevant message.

Filters

Advanced filters can be passed programmatically via the RPC:

Filter	Description
sessionId	Restrict to a specific session
dateFrom	Messages created at or after this ISO-8601 timestamp
dateTo	Messages created before or at this ISO-8601 timestamp
role	"user" or "assistant"

BM25 Ranking

Results are ordered by BM25 rank (lower rank = more relevant). The FTS5 tokenizer uses Porter stemming (porter unicode61), so searching "run" also matches "running", "runs", etc.

RPC Reference

session.search

Request:

{
  "query": "code completion",
  "limit": 20,
  "filterBy": {
    "sessionId": "optional-session-uuid",
    "dateFrom": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
    "dateTo": "2026-12-31T23:59:59Z",
    "role": "user"
  }
}

Response:

{
  "results": [
    {
      "sessionId": "abc123",
      "messageId": "msg456",
      "snippet": "…the <b>code completion</b> engine…",
      "role": "assistant",
      "createdAt": "2026-03-01T14:30:00Z",
      "rank": -5.2
    }
  ],
  "totalHits": 1
}

Snippet highlights use <b>…</b> HTML tags. Strip them in plain-text contexts.

Implementation

• SQLite FTS5 virtual table session_fts (migration 028)
• Auto-populated by an AFTER INSERT trigger on the messages table
• Backfilled at migration time for existing messages
• DELETE trigger keeps the index clean when messages are removed