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Search

mor offers three ways to search, each suited to different needs.

Full-text search (find)

Section titled “Full-text search (find)”

Uses SQLite FTS5 with the porter unicode61 tokenizer.

Terminal window
mor find "retry http"
mor find "retry http" --json    # JSON output with content
  • Stemming — “running” matches “run”, “runs”, “running”
  • OR-ranked — multi-word queries match any term, ranked by how many match
  • Unicode-aware — dots, hyphens, and other punctuation are token separators
  • Scores — results are ranked 0.0 to 1.0, best match first. Results below threshold are filtered out (default 0.3, configurable via -s or threshold in config)
  • Access boost — frequently accessed memories get a small ranking boost (max ~5%), helping surface practical information over time
  • JSON output — --json returns an array of {id, title, description, tags, score, content} for programmatic use (e.g. hooks, scripts)

When embeddings are configured, find merges FTS and vector results using Reciprocal Rank Fusion — no manual weight tuning needed.

Grep (grep)

Section titled “Grep (grep)”

Searches by substring or regex.

Terminal window
mor grep "Retry-After" -i
mor grep -E "async\s+function" -i
  • Exact match — no stemming or tokenization (default)
  • Regex — with -E flag, uses JavaScript regular expressions
  • Word match — with -w flag, matches whole words only
  • Case-insensitive — with -i flag
  • Line numbers — with -n flag
  • Files only — with -l flag, shows only memory titles
  • Context — -A <n> after, -B <n> before, -C <n> both
  • Searches title and content — finds strings anywhere in the memory

Use grep for code identifiers, URLs, special characters, patterns, or anything FTS might tokenize away.

Query resolution (cat, edit, rm, etc.)

Section titled “Query resolution (cat, edit, rm, etc.)”

Commands that take a <query> argument resolve it in order:

  1. Full UUID — exact match
  2. UUID prefix — 8+ character prefix, must be unique
  3. Filename — matches the .md filename in the memory folder
  4. FTS search — falls back to full-text search, returns the top hit
Terminal window
mor cat 405614a7           # UUID prefix
mor cat retryWithBackoff    # filename match
mor cat "retry backoff"     # FTS search

Filtering

Section titled “Filtering”

All search commands support filters that narrow results by metadata:

Terminal window
mor find "http" --tag "rxjs"       # only rxjs-tagged memories
mor grep "TODO" --type snippet     # only snippets
mor ls --ext .fs                   # only F# files
mor ls --repo "github.com/org/*"   # only from specific repos

Filters use glob patterns — * matches anything, ? matches one character.