aics

aics (AI Chat Search) is a cross-platform Rust TUI for searching local Claude Code and Codex CLI chat session history.

It builds a local Tantivy index over your session JSONL files and gives you an interactive terminal UI with full-text search, live previews, filters, and a markdown-rendered session viewer. It can also emit JSONL results for scripting, delete unwanted sessions, resume sessions, attach an AI-generated (Claude Code or Codex CLI) summary to sessions, and more.

Features

• Full-text search across Claude Code and Codex CLI sessions
• Incremental indexing — only new or changed sessions get re-indexed on startup
• Interactive TUI with session list, snippet preview, and scrollable full-session viewer
• Filter modal: scope, agent, date range, minimum length, session kind (original / trimmed / rollover / sub-agent), live sessions
• Sort by time or text relevance
• Markdown rendering with syntax highlighting and search-term highlighting in the viewer
• Multiple themes (lazygit, aics, sunset, late.sh), configurable via settings modal
• Configurable claude/codex launch commands so aics can hand off to resume a session
• --json mode for scripting
• JavaScript rules for previewing or applying batch session cleanup actions
• Cross-platform: Linux, macOS, Windows (path matching handles symlinks and Windows case-insensitivity)

Install

Pre-built binaries for Linux, macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), and Windows are published on the releases page.

From source: cargo install --path .

Screenshots

Usage

# Search sessions for the current directory, open the TUI
aics
# Search across all indexed sessions
aics -g
# Emit JSONL instead of launching the TUI
aics --json -g "vector db"
# Preview JavaScript cleanup rules from ~/.config/aics/rules.js
aics --preview-rules -g
# Write TypeScript declarations for JavaScript cleanup rules
aics --write-rules-dts
# Delete or rebuild the index
aics <--rebuild-index|--delete-index>

Run aics --help for the full flag list.

Scope

By default, searches are scoped to the current working directory. Use -g / --global to search everything, or --dir PATH[:BRANCH] to target a specific project (optionally filtered by branch).

Date filters

--after and --before accept YYYY-MM-DD or RFC3339 timestamps.

JavaScript rules

Rules live at ~/.config/aics/rules.js by default. Use --preview-rules to print proposed actions without changing files, or --apply-rules to apply supported actions. Use --rules PATH to test another rules file. Run aics --write-rules-dts to write TypeScript declarations for the rules API to ~/.config/aics/rules.d.ts.

rule("trash short commit helper sessions", ({ turns, re }) => {
  return turns.user.length === 2 &&
    re(String.raw`\s*[/$](gdf-)?commit\b`, "m").test(turns.user[0].text(4096))
    ? trash("commit helper")
    : nothing();
});

For the first implementation, rules can return nothing() or trash(reason). Rules mode honors the usual scope/filter flags such as -g, --dir, --agent, --after, --before, --min-lines, and --sub-agent, but it does not accept a text search query yet.

Large transcript fields are fetched from Rust only when a rule calls one of the lazy methods. The limit argument is optional; omitting it uses a practically unbounded default for stress testing, but normal rules should pass an explicit byte limit:

• session.firstUserText(limit), session.firstText(limit), session.lastText(limit)
• turns.user[n].text(limit), turns.contextualUser[n].text(limit), turns.agent[n].text(limit), turns.system[n].text(limit), turns.toolResults[n].text(limit)
• turns.exec[n].stdout(limit), turns.exec[n].stderr(limit)
• turns.patches[n].files[m].content(limit)

turns.user excludes Codex contextual user fragments such as automatically injected AGENTS.md content. Those entries are exposed separately as turns.contextualUser.

Keybindings (TUI)

Key	Action
↑ / ↓	Move selection
PgUp / PgDn	Scroll preview / viewer
⏎	Open actions menu for selected session
^F	Filters modal
^S	Settings modal
^T	Toggle preview panel
^Y	Toggle session/summary preview mode
^X	View menu
^] / ^\	Resize list/preview split; Ctrl+5 / Ctrl+4 are aliases
Shift+↑ / Shift+↓	Jump between messages in the viewer
? / ^L	Help
Esc	Cancel / close modal
^C	Quit

Indexing

Session data is indexed from:

• ~/.claude/projects/ (Claude Code)
• ~/.codex/sessions/ (Codex CLI)

By default, index data is stored under the user's home-relative cache dir, with one profile per discovered session-root set:

• {userhome}/.cache/aics/profiles/<profile-id>/

Each profile stores:

• index/ (Tantivy index files)
• index_state.json
• profile.json
• hashed-input.txt

Override the index/cache root with AICS_CACHE_ROOT.

Configuration file

Settings are stored in settings.json under the user's home-relative config dir:

• {userhome}/.config/aics/settings.json

Override the config root with AICS_CONFIG_ROOT.

Available options:

• theme (lazygit, aics, sunset, late.sh)
• claude_command default: claude, claude_args default: --dangerously-skip-permissions
• codex_command default: codex, codex_args default: --yolo
• show_preview
• preview_width_pct
• session_separator
• snippet_line_count
• summarize_command
• summarize_prompt

License

MIT. See LICENSE.