text-search

text-search

Use qmd to search indexed text corpora such as session logs, notes, docs, and logs. For indexed content, use qmd for discovery instead of raw grep.

First checks

Before searching, confirm what is indexed:

qmd status
qmd collection list
qmd context list

Do not assume collection names, paths, or contexts.

Core rule

For indexed corpora, use qmd for discovery.

Do not use grep/find/jq/cat directly on indexed files to search for meaning. This is especially important for session JSONL, which is noisy and hard to interpret raw.

Shell usage is still fine for:

• filtering tool output after discovery
• housekeeping and file targeting
• non-indexed content
• helper scripts in this skill

Choose the right qmd command

For exact clues, start with qmd search.

• Use qmd search for exact clues: tool names, error strings, repo names, JSON fields, literal phrases
• Use qmd query when lexical search is weak, the request is conceptual, or you want hybrid retrieval + reranking
• Use qmd vsearch only when you specifically want pure semantic similarity

qmd search '"toolName":"rp_exec"'
qmd search 'apply_edits'
qmd query "OAuth redirect flow"
qmd vsearch "the session where we changed direction"

Operational notes:

• qmd query may trigger local model startup or model downloads, so it is not always the fastest first step
• For session discovery, prefer --files first so you get compact path output instead of long snippets

Build better queries

Use --intent when the request is ambiguous

intent is a steering hint. Use it when the same words could refer to multiple things or when the user remembers the topic better than the exact wording.

qmd query --intent "Pi/Codex/Claude agent sessions about repo editing failures" \
  -c sessions \
  "apply_edits error"

Use structured query documents for important searches

Multi-line query documents are useful when you have both exact clues and fuzzy memory.