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Command palette and search

Jump to any page, project, prompt, skill or Vault entry from one search box, and search a project's files, types, members and text from the Workspace.

Runova has two search tools. The command palette is a quick way to jump anywhere in the app: pages, projects, worktrees, prompt history, skills and Vault entries. Workspace search is a bigger dialog inside the Workspace that finds files, types, members and text inside one project’s code, with a preview of each result.

Where to find it

For the command palette, click the search box in the middle of the title bar (“Search projects, history, skills…”) or press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on macOS). Pressing the shortcut again closes it.

For Workspace search, open a project’s Workspace and press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on macOS). See Workspace search below.

The command palette

The palette opens right over the title bar’s search box, so it looks as if the box grows downward with the results. Start typing and the list narrows to the matches. Matching looks at names and also at extra words such as a project’s folder path, description and tags.

What the palette lists

Before you type anything it shows these groups, and typing filters all of them.

Group What is in it
Go to Every page in the menu (Dashboard, Workspace, Projects, Prompt Builder, Ask AI, API Client, AI CLI Manager, Skills, MCP Servers, Agent Tools, Token Usage, Pipelines, Deploy, Docker, Android, Remote, Vault, Settings), plus Recent messages, which opens the message history, and Running CLIs, which opens the dialog with CPU and memory for every terminal.
Vault Shown once you have set up a Vault. While the Vault is locked, a single Unlock Vault entry takes you to the Vault page. While it is unlocked, there is a Lock Vault entry and one entry per saved item, shown by title. Choosing an item opens it in the Vault. Nothing is listed if the Vault has not been created yet.
Projects Every project, with its name and folder path. Choosing one opens its project page.
Prompt History Your earlier prompts and translations. Choosing one opens it in Prompt History.
Skills Skills from your skill repositories. Choosing one opens the Skills page filtered to that skill.

Some entries appear only once you start typing:

  • Open workspace. Entries like “Workspace: My App” for every project that is not archived. They open that project’s Workspace directly.
  • Worktrees. Git worktrees of the projects open in the Workspace rail, shown as the project name and branch. Choosing one opens that worktree’s Workspace. When a project’s Workspace is on screen, a “New worktree of …” entry lets you create one.

Using the palette

  1. Press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on macOS).
  2. Type a few letters. The best match is highlighted.
  3. Press Enter to open the highlighted entry, or use the up and down arrow keys to pick another and then Enter. You can also click an entry.
  4. Press Esc, or Ctrl+K again, to close it without choosing.

If nothing matches, the palette says No results found. The text you typed is cleared when the palette closes, so the next time you open it you start fresh.

Tip: To reach a page fast, type just a few letters of its name, for example “vault” or “docker”, and press Enter.

Workspace search is a large dialog for finding things in the code of one project. It opens on the project whose Workspace is on screen, and it remembers the last search you typed for each project, so reopening it picks up where you left off.

Open and close it

  • Press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on macOS) while a project’s Workspace is showing. Pressing it again while the dialog is open selects the text in the box so you can start a fresh search.
  • You can also open it from the file search box in the Workspace Files panel. Its Search files and code button, and the Search in file contents for … row under the results, hand what you typed over to the dialog.
  • Press Esc or click the close button to leave.

Ctrl+P goes to the Projects page everywhere else in the app. On the Workspace it opens search instead. You can change either key in Settings, Shortcuts. See Keyboard shortcuts.

The search box in the Workspace Files panel also takes patterns, so you can list files by shape instead of by name:

  • *.md lists every Markdown file in the project, in any folder. * stands for any run of characters inside one folder name, and ? for exactly one character.
  • docs/*.md lists the Markdown files directly inside any docs folder. docs/**/*.md also goes into the folders below it.
  • Put a regular expression between two slashes for anything a wildcard cannot say, for example /\.test\.tsx?$/ for test files. It is matched against the whole path and ignores case.

Anything else is searched by name as before. If a regular expression is not valid, the box says so instead of showing an empty list. The full Workspace search dialog does not read these patterns.

What you can search for

The row of tabs above the box picks what to search for. The tab you choose is shown as a short prefix in the box, and you can type the prefix yourself instead.

Tab Prefix What it finds
All none Files, types, members and text together, in sections. Each section shows the first few results and a See all N row that switches to that tab.
Files f: Files by name or path.
Types t: Classes, interfaces, structs, enums, type aliases, records, traits and namespaces, found by their declaration.
Members m: Functions, methods, constructors, properties, fields and constants, found by their declaration.
Text x: The text inside files.

Each tab can show a count of matches. Press Tab to move to the next tab and Shift+Tab for the previous one. When the box is empty on the All or Files tab, it lists your recent files for that project.

Jump to a line

On the All and Files tabs, add a line to a file name to open the file at that line:

  • app.ts:42 opens line 42.
  • app.ts:42:7 opens line 42, column 7.
  • app.ts(42) also opens line 42.

A path that starts with a drive letter and a slash, such as f:\src, is read as a path, not as the Files prefix.

Text search options

At the right end of the box are three toggles. Each can also be flipped with a key.

Toggle Key Effect
Match case (Aa) Alt+C Treats upper and lower case as different.
Match whole word (ab) Alt+W Matches only whole words.
Use regular expression (.*) Alt+R Reads what you typed as a regular expression instead of plain text.

The choices are remembered. Text search waits for a short pause in typing, and in the All tab it starts after three characters (two in the Text tab). It respects .gitignore, searches hidden files, skips .git and node_modules, and skips files larger than 2 MB. Each file shows at most 100 matches, and a whole search stops at 2000 matches, with the footer saying that only the first are shown.

The Types and Members tabs read declarations in TypeScript and JavaScript, Python, Go, Rust, C#, Java, Kotlin, Swift, PHP and C and C++ files. If a project is very large, the footer notes that some files or declarations were left out.

Open a result

Key What it does
Up and Down Move through results.
PageUp and PageDown Move ten results at a time.
Enter Opens the file (at the right line, when the result points to one) as a pinned tab and closes the dialog.
Shift+Enter Opens it as a preview tab and keeps the dialog open, so you can look at several results in a row.
Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter) Splits the pane and opens the result to the side.

You can also click a result. File results show their git status letter when the file has changes, and type and member results show a small badge for the kind, such as C for class or ƒ for function.

The preview

The lower part of the dialog previews the selected result with the matching line in view. Click the eye button in the tab row to hide or show the preview, and drag the handle between the list and the preview to resize it. For pictures, a button in the preview turns Hide picture previews on, which stops the dialog reading image files at all and is useful in projects with large assets. The dialog remembers the preview size and visibility.

Global shortcuts

A few shortcuts work on every page of the app. The defaults below use Ctrl, and on macOS the app uses Cmd instead. Change any of them in Settings, Shortcuts tab.

Shortcut What it does
Ctrl+K Opens or closes the command palette.
Ctrl+P Goes to the Projects page. On the Workspace it opens Workspace search instead.
Ctrl+T or Ctrl+` Opens or closes the terminal drawer.
Ctrl+Shift+` Starts a new terminal tab in the drawer.
Shift+F5 Stops the project run in the drawer, or the newest run if none is showing.
Alt+Left and Alt+Right Go back and forward through visited pages (Cmd+[ and Cmd+] on macOS also work).
/ On the Projects page, focuses the project search box.

Global shortcuts pause while a dialog that uses the same keys is open. For example, Ctrl+P does not jump to Projects from behind an open dialog, and in the Prompt Builder Ctrl+T translates instead of toggling the terminal. The Workspace, Prompt Builder, commit box and Vault have their own shortcuts. See Keyboard shortcuts.

Tips

  • The title bar search box and Ctrl+K open the same palette.
  • Use Ctrl+P in a project to open a file by name in a couple of keystrokes, the way editors do.
  • Start a search with x: when you only want text matches, or t: to jump straight to a class.
  • If a search finds nothing in a file you expect, check that it is not ignored by .gitignore or larger than 2 MB.