Mode toggles (right end of the input, VS Code style): Aa case-sensitive, ab whole word (pnpm no longer hits npm), .* regex, fz fuzzy subsequence. ab stacks with .* (the pattern is wrapped in \b); fz is exclusive with ab / .*. All off by default (plain substring).
Results: the hit is colored; the snippet window uses the same algorithm as VS Code (word-bounded lead + single-line ellipsis). A session with several hits shows ▾ N at the end of the row; expand to list every hit (up to 8, identical snippets deduped). Several dropdowns can stay open at once. The clicked hit row takes the selection background (the session header does not); that dropdown's indent guide stays on; hovering the result list reveals the guides on the other open dropdowns.
Jump + highlight: a click locates the event by seq — older history is paged in automatically, and a collapsed context-injection row is expanded before marking. The chosen hit scrolls into the center and is filled; every other occurrence on the page is boxed. Switching sessions, or clicking anywhere on the page after the search box has collapsed, clears the marks.
Private fast index: only user / assistant message TEXT blocks are indexed (injected context counts as a user message; tool arguments, results, and reasoning are left out). Queries answer in milliseconds and skip the official engine's per-call reconcile.
Ready at boot (persisted incremental cache): extracted documents are cached on disk keyed by each session log's persistence revision, so a restart only re-reads sessions that actually changed. Measured on 25 sessions / 49 MB of compressed logs: ~90 ms with no changes, ~2.4 s for a cold build.

The official expand animation, in-place results replacing the session list, and Esc / outside-click collapse stay as they are.

Usage

The stock sidebar search box is the entry; there is no extra panel.

Open search. The default is a plain substring over titles (client) and content (host index).
Turn on Aa / ab / .* / fz at the right end of the input when needed. With fz on there is usually no contiguous string to mark in the page, so the view only scrolls near the hit.
Expand ▾ N on a multi-hit session and click a row to jump to that message.
Press Esc or click outside the box to collapse. The next click anywhere on the page clears the fill and the boxes.

Architecture

Host half (src/index.ts): builds the in-memory index at boot, then keeps it incremental through the session/event feed with (sessionId, seq) deduplication. Serves POST /api/search-plus/query (substring / fuzzy subsequence / regex, with case and whole-word flags, per-session windowed snippets and match offsets). Host-half changes need a dsh restart.
Document cache (src/doc-cache.ts): the boot build reads the cache first, then reconciles it against listSnapshots() — one cheap change token per session. An unchanged revision reuses cached documents with zero log reads; a changed or uncached session is re-read; a session gone from disk is dropped. The cache is republished by atomic write once the build finishes.
Document extraction (src/doc-scan.ts): scans each session's verbatim artifact line by line, skipping packed storage rows such as text-chunks. That avoids all delta unpacking the logical read path performs (on this machine 232k physical lines expand to 1.79M logical events, none of which the index needs).
Browser half (src/client/): a fork of official @deepseek-ai/dsh-client-ui-workspace@0.1.0-rc.6 WorkspaceBrowser. Unmodified regions stay byte-identical to the official bundle; every change is marked // [search-plus]. An official upgrade requires re-porting against the new baseline. Content queries go to /api/search-plus/query; title matching stays on the client. A page reload only picks up the frontend.

Boot warmup of the official index lives in the sibling dsh-session-search-warmup: it commits the official SQLite FTS5 index during the quiet boot window so the official search surface this plugin does not take over (rail mode, fallback paths) works on first query. The two compose; neither requires the other.

Install

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-session-search-plus

Or manually: add this package to the web profile's dsh.profile.bundles, install dependencies, restart dsh web.

Do not also insert a session-search-plus row into ~/.dsh/profiles/web/cordis.patch.yml — the loader refuses duplicate insert ids. The fork replaces the official search slots, so the profile must also disable the official ui-workspace row (same cordis.patch.yml).

Verify

dsh --profile web --dump-config   # shows the session-search-plus row

After boot, watch the host log for:

[search-plus] content index ready: N docs, A sessions from cache, B re-read in Xms

On the first boot A is 0 (cold build). On any later restart with no session changes, A equals the session count, B is 0, and the time drops to hundreds of milliseconds. Then type into the sidebar search box: content hits with colored snippets and per-session dropdowns confirm the takeover.

Configuration

Both keys are optional and rarely need changing:

Key	Default	Meaning
`cachePath`	`<harness home>/session-search-plus-cache.json.zstd`	Cache file location
`rawScan`	`true`	Read verbatim artifacts. Set `false` to force the logical event read (~6x slower); only needed if the harness changes how storage rows are packed

The cache file is around 240 KB and safe to delete at any time — the next boot rebuilds it. Corruption, a version mismatch, or a failed write all degrade to a cold build without affecting startup.

Uninstall

dsh plugin --profile web remove dsh-session-search-plus

Restart dsh and restore the official ui-workspace row that the profile had disabled. Sidebar search returns to the stock implementation.

Known limits

A hit deep in history (the start of a years-old session) has to page in the official 50-messages-per-page window and can take ten-odd seconds to land; a shallow hit is instant.
fz defaults off: a fuzzy subsequence hit may contain no contiguous query string, so the page has nothing to mark.
An invalid regex returns empty results with no red-box hint.