[FEATURE]: TUI - Search for and find string in session buffer

[cwegener]

Feature hasn't been suggested before.

• I have verified this feature I'm about to request hasn't been suggested before.

Describe the enhancement you want to request

Similar to how 'find' works in a text editor, I sometimes need to find a certain string in the agent's output.

This does not seem possible in the TUI at the moment.

Some possible inspirations to look at for designing such a feature:

1. vim (both normal buffers and vim's terminal buffer)
2. tmux

Also, ghostty community has had some interesting conversations about their design of the scrollback search feature: ghostty-org/ghostty#189

[github-actions]

This issue might be a duplicate of existing issues. Please check:

• 🚀 Feature Request: Add Quick Session Search Interface (Ctrl+K) #3361: Add Quick Session Search Interface (Ctrl+K) - Requests a search interface for sessions with real-time filtering, which is similar in concept to finding strings in output
• feat: Copy Mode for OpenCode #2755: Copy Mode for OpenCode - Requests vim/tmux-like copy mode with text selection and navigation, which would support finding and selecting specific text in the buffer

Feel free to ignore if your specific use case for searching agent output differs from these session/copy mode features.

[rekram1-node]

good idea

[cwegener]

good idea

I only just noticed it today for the first time that this is a functionality that would be useful. (And I've been using opencode for 2 months now)

The way I realized that I needed to find strings in the session's output buffer was because I was running opencode on a codebase that I am not extremely familiar with. And I was running the 'Plan' agent quite a lot to produce a lot of summaries to specific questions that I had about the code base (mostly architecture).

And when I went back to the historical session in the TUI on the next day, I wanted to check if some of the session output had already mentioned one particular method inside one of the codebase's modules I wanted to know more about.

My idea being, that if my previous session's context was already mentioning the name of the particular method I was after, I might just continue that same session and get a really good output in response. And otherwise I might start a new session ...

But I'm sure there are additional use cases for such find/search inside session buffer functionality.

[ariane-emory]

Upvoting, I'd love to see this feature too.

[OpeOginni]

Have a PR for something like this, any feedback?

further-reduced.mov

[rekram1-node]

this is cool, Im not 100% sure if we wanna put it in the prompt box but this is very nice ill have david (our designer) take a look

[xidiot]

This is something I'm looking since day 1.

[unphased]

I'm building a high scalability terminal recorder that will let me travel through time to solve this issue in general for terminals, but... it's not close to ready yet and it's also not quite the right hammer for this nail.

I must say it's rather appalling that this feature does not exist yet. I've been extremely impressed with opencode so far though. For example the syntax colorization of code diffs is chef's kiss:

[nesk]

This would definitely be useful, I sometimes have to search for a specific a message in the session.

[DebelToni]

Get this merged to main ASAP. Any implementation is fine. BTW why does the TTI use the single windowed mode instead of continuing terminal flow so we can use tmux to find and to stuff?

[unphased]

Because if you look at an implementation of a console that uses the scrollback, like codex, it's insanely easy to corrupt and garble the output and scrollback just by resizing your terminal. This way is better but IMO it should not have even shipped without a search feature...

[DebelToni]

Because if you look at an implementation of a console that uses the scrollback, like codex, it's insanely easy to corrupt and garble the output and scrollback just by resizing your terminal. This way is better but IMO it should not have even shipped without a search feature...

You are completely right! Thanks. Until something is merged I use /export without saving and then find what I need in Neovim