Search palette
The search shortcuts are intentionally suppressed in a few modal contexts, and message search deliberately skips a few kinds of content.
Ctrl+K does nothing
The shortcut doesn’t open the global search.
The palette is suppressed while the onboarding wizard, the lock screen or Private Chat owns the window - the title-bar search pill is disabled or hidden then too - and while another dialog (Settings, a confirmation) is open. Finish onboarding, unlock the app, or close Private Chat or the dialog first.
On macOS, press ⌘ + K: Ctrl + K belongs to the text field there, where it deletes to the end of the line. The shortcut works on any keyboard layout. On layouts without Latin letters, such as Cyrillic and Greek, it follows the key’s position - press the key where K sits on an English keyboard.
Search doesn’t find a phrase I know I wrote
You remember the wording, but the palette returns nothing - or only chat titles.
Message search covers live transcripts, and deliberately skips several things:
- Archived chats. The archive has no search of its own - unarchive the chat from Settings → Archive to bring it back into scope.
- Private Chat. It never writes to the database, so nothing from it is searchable by design.
- Text inside an attachment or a fetched page. Those bodies are inlined into the message but not displayed in the bubble, so a hit there would jump nowhere. Open the attachment instead.
- A reply’s thinking trace. Only the reply itself is searched.
- Imported turns you hid from the transcript. Expanding the collapsed card shows them, but there’s no un-hide - they stay out of both this search and the in-chat finder. Re-import without Hide from transcript if you need them findable.
- System notices, which aren’t conversation.
- Words deep inside a Library item. Items match by title, the opening of their text (about 280 characters) and a link’s address only - see I can’t find a Library item.
Two more things to check: the query needs at least two characters, and case-insensitivity in message search is ASCII-only - a query with accented or non-Latin characters matches transcript text at its own case but not across cases. Try the exact casing you used.
If titles crowd out what you want, narrow with the scope dropdown or type in:messages in the query - scoped to messages, transcript hits get the whole list instead of a reserved block at the bottom. See Search.
Ctrl+F does nothing
The in-chat finder doesn’t open.
The finder searches the open chat’s transcript, so it needs a chat with at least one message on screen - nothing happens on a new, empty chat or while the Spaces, Library, Snippets or Models view is showing. Like the palette, it’s unavailable in Private Chat, during onboarding, behind the lock screen and while a dialog is open. You can also open it with Search in chat in the chat header’s … menu, or by typing /find.