Finding things

Ctrl+K from anywhere opens the search box. So does the field in the top bar, if your hands are on the mouse.

Before you type anything

The empty box is not empty: it lists the last few works you opened, newest first. Whatever is being worked on is nearly always one of them, and recognising a name is faster than typing it — so Ctrl+K ↵ reopens what you had a minute ago.

The list is six long, it belongs to this machine rather than to the workspace, and a work leaves it when it is deleted. Typing replaces it with real results.

What it searches

It looks in four places at once, and groups what it finds:

Group	What is searched
Works	Titles, the craft fields, and the tags
Drafts	The full text of every version, in every role
Notes	The body and the title of notes attached to a work
Assistant	What was said in chats about a work

Each hit opens the work it belongs to, on the tab where the hit lives — a line found in a draft opens Versions, a note opens Notes.

It is for recognising, not for browsing

The box shows a few hits per group rather than everything that matched. Past half a dozen the list stops being scannable, and the useful answer is a narrower query rather than a longer list.

That is also why hits are shown as text rather than as counts: a draft hit is the line it was found in, with a little of what surrounds it, so you can tell this verse from that one without opening either.

The keyboard is the point

• Ctrl+K opens it, from anywhere — including from inside a text field.
• ↑ and ↓ walk the hits, across group boundaries.
• ↵ opens the highlighted one.
• Esc closes without going anywhere.

Case does not matter, in any language

Searching for гавань finds Гавань огней, and HARBOUR finds Harbour lights.

That is worth saying because it is not free. SQLite’s plain case-insensitive matching covers ASCII and nothing else — to it, Г and г are unrelated bytes. The search index folds in full Unicode, which is why a Russian workspace is as searchable as an English one.

A word finds the forms of a word

Typing холодильник finds a line that says в холодильнике, and кофе finds кофейня. Every word you type is matched as a beginning rather than as a whole word, because there is no stemmer for Russian here and the word as typed is rarely the word as written.

The same rule is why light finds lights — and why lights does not find light. Type the shorter form when you are not sure.

Two words narrow rather than widen: холодильник кофе finds the works that say both, which is the question “where did I write about both of those” and the reason the box is useful at all.

Punctuation is never syntax. A stray quote, a dash, a colon — they are searched for as text, or ignored, and never turn into an error you have to decode.

What it does not do yet

• No operators. No kind:song, no quoted phrases. One box, one query, everything at once. This box is for going somewhere — it answers “where is that line”, across drafts, notes and chats, and every hit opens a work. Narrowing a list down to a set of works is a different question, and the catalogue’s own box answers it with status:, kind:, tier:, tag: and stage: — and with the same full-text search behind it.
• A word is matched from its beginning, not from its middle. холод finds холодильник; дильник finds nothing.
• Nothing outside the active profile. Switching profiles switches what is searchable, like everywhere else in kilna.

The text is kept in an index that is written as you write, rather than read back on every keystroke, so the answer does not slow down as the workspace grows. Nothing has to be rebuilt or maintained by hand: editing a lyric updates what it finds, and deleting a work takes it out.