find

rigger find <QUERY> [--project <NAME>] [--kind <KIND>] [--limit <N>] [--json]

Searches every event of every project: decisions, findings, pitfalls, and the changes read out of commit messages. It exists because a record that has been accumulating for a year is past the point where anyone remembers where a thing was settled - and re-deciding something already argued through is the expensive kind of forgetting.

$ rigger find budget
sample       2026-09-04  decision  The budget is a gate, not a suggestion.
sample       2026-09-04  pitfall   A wide window hides what the budget dropped.

Each line shows the text around the match, not the start of the event. A decision in a real record runs to fifteen hundred characters and states its subject in a heading, so the first line often does not contain the word searched for - and a result you cannot see the reason for reads as a wrong result.

What ranks first

What a person wrote outranks what a commit message said, at equal relevance. A commit can always be read again in git; a decision or a pitfall exists nowhere else, and the answer to “where did we decide this?” must not arrive under three commits that happen to share a word.

Both are searched, though - “when did we fix that?” is as real a question as “where did we decide that?”.

Narrowing

$ rigger find budget --project sample --kind decision
2026-09-04  decision  The budget is a gate, not a suggestion.

The project column disappears when the search is for one project. --kind takes any kind an event can have: decision, finding, pitfall, change, question, wish.

A project name that does not exist is refused rather than answered with nothing - an empty result would send you looking for the wrong thing.

How a query is read

A bare word is searched as a prefix. Russian inflects and SQLite has no stemmer for it: searching a real record for бюджет found two events where бюджет* found eight, because the word appears as бюджета, бюджету, бюджетом. English loses nothing by the same rule.

Anything using FTS5 syntax is passed through untouched, so the full language stays available:

Query	Means
budget	any word starting with “budget”
two words	both, each as a prefix
"exact phrase"	those words, in that order
packet AND budget	events with both
packet NOT commit	one without the other

When nothing matches, that is a result rather than a failure:

$ rigger find zzz
Nothing matches "zzz".
A bare word is searched as a prefix: try a shorter one, or FTS5 syntax - "exact phrase", `one OR two`.

Related

• why - the events behind one version, rather than one word.
• context - the recent events, without searching.
• note - how the searchable events get there.