[hsusul]

Why

The rebuilt UI puts the query syntax front and center. Two gaps made the search line feel broken.

• A query of filters alone, like has:error or agent:codex, returned an empty page.
• repo: matched only an internal repository id. Typing repo:lore matched nothing.

What changed

• A query with filters but no plain terms now returns one SearchHit per matching session, newest first.
  • It uses the same keyset pagination, and next_cursor appears only on a full page.
  • SortOrder::Relevance falls back to newest. Oldest is honoured. The doc comment on search_page says so.
  • A query with neither terms nor filters still returns an empty page. So do filters that parse to nothing, such as agent: or git-source:bogus.
• Filter-only hit shape, with the DTOs in lore-ipc unchanged:
  • The hit describes the session by its first redacted search_document. That is the native title if there is one (session / title), otherwise the opening message (message_part).
  • snippet is that redacted text, whitespace-collapsed and cut to 160 characters, with no highlight markers.
  • rank is 0. A session with no projected text gets session / title and an empty snippet.
  • The cursor is keyed on the session id, so it has its own shape. A cursor from the other kind of query decodes to nothing and gives the first page.
• repo: now accepts a repository id, a display name, or the last component of primary_path.
  • Names match case-insensitively. A name shared by several repositories matches all of them.
  • An unknown name matches nothing. The literal value is always kept as an id candidate, so the id form works as before.
  • Resolution is plain string equality in Rust, not LIKE. The candidate ids go to SQL as one JSON array parameter.
• The filter SQL is now one shared function used by both paths. The term path builds the same SQL as before.

Scope

• crates/lore-core/src/search.rs
• crates/lore-core/tests/search.rs
• No change to lore-ipc, query.rs, ingest.rs, migrations, adapters, src/, or src-tauri/.

Blast Radius

• The UI search line, lorectl search, and the lorectl mcp search tool all call search_page. A filter-only query now lists sessions in each of them instead of returning nothing.
• Term queries are unchanged in behavior, except that repo:<name> now resolves names.
• The security properties are unchanged.
  • Every filter value is a bound parameter.
  • FTS input is still quoted phrases.
  • Filter-only snippets come from search_document.redacted_text, never from raw message text.
• repo: reads the whole repository table once per query that uses it. That table has one row per repository.

Verification

• cargo fmt --all -- --check: passed.
• cargo clippy -p lore-core -p lore-ipc -p lorectl --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings: passed.
• cargo test -p lore-core --test search: 40 passed, 0 failed. 14 of the 40 are new. Four new unit tests cover the helpers.
• cargo test --workspace: exit 0, no failures.
• Mutation check: with filter-only disabled, 12 of the new tests fail. With name resolution disabled, 5 fail.
• End to end on a synthetic archive (scripts/synth-archive.sh /tmp/sf-homes 30 20 7, then lorectl scan):
  • agent:codex lists the 20 Codex sessions. agent:claude-code fills the CLI's 20-row page.
  • has:error reports no matches, because the synthetic archive has no failed tool calls. The tests cover it.
  • The synthetic archive has no repositories, so repo: was checked on a copy with one repository row and its link rows added by SQL. repo:repo_demo, repo:loreapp and repo:DEMO-display each returned the same 7 sessions. repo:nope and repo:* returned none.
  • Real ~/.claude, ~/.codex and the default archive were not touched.
• Not run: the desktop UI and lorectl mcp end to end.