Press ⌘K and type. Results are grouped by session, with a count of matching messages and up to three highlighted excerpts. Click an excerpt to open its exact message, or click the session title to open the conversation. Show all matches expands the session; Load more matches adds twenty excerpts at a time.
Relevance puts title matches first, then ranks sessions by their best matching excerpt. Recent sorts by the last update. Browse loads one hundred sessions at a time and search loads fifty. Showing X of Y sessions reports the loaded count and exact matching total; Load more sessions or Load more search results appends the next page. Changing a query, filter, or sort, or refreshing the library, resets paging. The Include archived control controls archived results; leave it off to search active sessions only. When a search finds nothing, Ronda says how many filters are active and offers Clear filters and Include archived.
Open Filters to combine session update dates, model, and host with project, agent, starred, and archive choices. Host distinguishes All hosts, Local sessions, and a named remote host. Model and host options come from the full library, including archived sessions. Missing model metadata stays included under All models. The control reads Filters (N) while N filters are active, and Clear beside it resets them all in one click.
Dates use your local calendar: Updated from includes the start of that day; Updated through includes the entire end day, even when daylight saving time changes the day's length. Inverted ranges show an error. Clear filters resets the controls. An already-open conversation remains readable when filters hide it, with an Outside current filters label. The desktop remembers your last filter choices and search sort; the current query is not saved automatically.
Choose Save current search to give a nonempty query a name and save its current filters and sort. Open Saved searches to replay it against the current index, rename it, or remove it. Saved searches stay in local preferences; each may include literal query text and a project path. The list holds up to 20 entries, with names up to 80 characters and queries up to 512 characters. If a saved project, model, or host is unavailable, Ronda keeps the exact filter and tells you; choose Clear unavailable filters to broaden it explicitly. If saved-search data cannot be read, Ronda leaves it untouched until you choose Clear and reset saved searches. Press Escape in the save or rename field to close it; focus returns to the control you came from, and after Remove it moves to the Saved searches summary. Saving is explicit; separately, the focused empty search box offers your last eight completed searches (distinct, trimmed, newest first) as Recent searches. Press Enter or click one to run it, use Remove beside an entry, or Clear recent to empty the list; it never records every keystroke or bookmark searches. If the recent-search data cannot be read, Ronda leaves it untouched and hides the list. The browser preview uses synthetic preferences that reset on reload.
Session labels are a small catalog of named labels, separate from stars and pins. In Filters, open Manage labels to create, rename, or delete labels (up to 12, each 1–40 characters, unique ignoring case). With a session open, use Add label to assign up to four labels and × to remove one. Choose a label in the sidebar or the Label filter to show one label at a time, combined with the project, agent, host, starred, archive, date, and model controls; bookmarks follow the labels of their linked session. Deleting a label removes it from every session. Saved searches can include the selected label; if that label is later deleted, Ronda keeps the exact filter, so nothing broader is shown, until you choose Clear unavailable filters or Clear label filter. Sessions that disappear from their source keep their label assignments in the local index until you remove the label or the assignment. The browser preview uses a fixed synthetic label catalog that resets on reload.
Sort the library. With no search active, Sort sessions in the filters orders the list by Recently updated (the default), Least recently updated, Newest created, or Most tokens; sessions without a token count come last. Pinned sessions always stay at the top, and ties break consistently so paging never repeats or skips a session. The desktop remembers your choice with your filters. Search results keep their own Relevance / Recent sort, and saved searches are unchanged. The browser preview honors the sort.
Renaming sessions. With a session open, choose Rename session beside the star and pin buttons to give it a local title. Save, Cancel, or Escape closes the editor; Reset title restores the original. The local title replaces the source title in the session list, bookmark list, session header, and the window title, and the original shows as secondary text. Titles are 1–120 characters, trimmed, and at most 500 sessions can have one. They are stored only in a local preference, never in the agent’s files, and Markdown export keeps the source title. Typing in the search box also matches local titles of sessions already loaded in the list or in your bookmarks; desktop full-text search still matches the source titles only. If the stored preference cannot be read, Ronda shows source titles and does not overwrite it. The browser preview keeps titles in memory and resets on reload.
Bulk star, pin, and labels. Hold ⌘ or Ctrl and click session rows to select them, Shift-click to select a range, or press Space on a focused row (Shift+↑ / Shift+↓ extends the range). Press ⌘A (Ctrl+A) with the session list focused to select every loaded session. A plain click still just opens the session. When anything is selected, a Bulk session actions bar shows the count with Star, Unstar, Pin, Unpin, a label picker with Add label and Remove label, Undo, and Clear selection. Each action changes only that flag and leaves the other as it was, and the result is announced, for example “Starred 3 sessions”. Undo restores the previous star and pin values of the last bulk action until you start another bulk action or change the search, filters, or sort; it is kept in memory only. Only sessions already loaded in the list can be selected, and changing the search, filters, sort, label, or replaying a saved search clears the selection. Choosing a label and Add label assigns it to every selected session, one session at a time; a session already at the four-label limit is skipped and counted (for example “Labeled 5 sessions, skipped 2 at the label limit”), and sessions that already have the label are left alone. Remove label removes it from the selected sessions that have it. Undo restores each session’s previous labels exactly. Bulk actions never move sessions to Trash. The browser preview applies them to synthetic sessions and resets on reload.
Search uses SQLite FTS5 with a trigram tokenizer, so it matches code fragments like useEffect( and prose in any language without a word segmenter. Queries shorter than three characters fall back to substring matching. Matching is case-insensitive and every whitespace-separated query term must occur in the same title or indexed message. Tool names and inputs are searchable; thinking and tool output are not part of the global index.
On the September 17, 2026 synthetic 800 MiB / 300-session fixture, raw CLI search measured 23 ms p50 and 26 ms p95 on an Apple M3 Pro, including startup. The October 2 rerun measured 32.16 ms p95 for raw CLI search and 14.70 ms p95 for grouped queries on a warm read-only connection. The grouped query counted 300 sessions and 1,800 matching messages; neither result measures UI paint.