Search

"Searching is half of finding." — Senegalese proverb

Pi Session Manager provides powerful full-text search across all your sessions, powered by a dual-engine architecture combining SQLite FTS5 and Tantivy.

Search Engines

SQLite FTS5

The primary search engine. All session content is indexed into an FTS5 virtual table (message_fts) inside the SQLite database (~/.pi/agent/sessions/sessions.db). This provides:

• Fast prefix and phrase matching
• BM25 ranking (via bm25() function)
• Low memory footprint
• Auto-sync via content='message_entries' (no manual triggers needed)

FTS5 can be toggled via the enable_fts5 setting in the configuration file.

Tantivy

A Rust-native full-text search library (similar to Lucene) used as a secondary index in data/search/tantivy.rs. Tantivy provides:

• More sophisticated tokenization (unicode61)
• Better relevance scoring for complex queries
• Concurrent indexing via data/search/index.rs

Both engines are accessible through the unified search client (data/search/client.rs).

Session ID Matching

In addition to FTS, the search system supports exact and prefix matching on session IDs:

• Exact match: score 1,000,000
• Prefix match (≥3 chars): score 999,000
• Session ID results are always ranked above content matches

Content Search

Message-Level FTS5

Each message in a session is indexed individually in message_entries:

• entry_id — unique message identifier
• session_path — path to parent session
• role — user or assistant
• source_type — user, assistant, or thinking
• content — message text

Search results are deduplicated per (session_path, entry_id) and limited to 3 hits per session.

CJK Support

For Chinese/Japanese/Korean text, FTS5 unicode61 tokenization is unreliable. The search falls back to LIKE substring matching when CJK characters are detected in the query.

Filters

Role Filter

Narrow results to specific message roles:

Sort Order

Results can be sorted by:

Snippet Highlighting

Search results display content with matching text context. Click a result to jump directly to the matching message in the Session Viewer.

Plugin System

The search system uses a plugin architecture with three built-in plugins:

Plugins are registered in src/plugins/ and can be extended to add custom search sources.

Command Palette

Press Cmd/Ctrl + K to open the command palette — a cmdk-based interface that combines search with quick actions:

• Search sessions by name or content
• Switch views (list, project, kanban)
• Open settings
• Toggle terminal
• Navigate to any session

Keyboard Shortcuts