History and Search

AITerm has four separate tools for finding things: the command palette, the history browser, terminal scrollback search, and command-mark navigation.

Command palette (⌘K)

⌘K opens the command palette ("Search commands and actions…"). It offers:

• Quick actions — jump to Manage models, Command history, Runbooks, Fix the last command, Clear AI context, and Using the Agent.
• Recent commands — your history, ranked by a tiered lexical match (exact > prefix > substring > subsequence) over both the command and the original plain-English request, with a boost for the current directory and for recency. A command that came from AI translation shows the original request beneath it.

Selecting a command loads it into the input bar — it doesn't run until you press Return.

Command history (⌘Y)

⌘Y opens the History browser ("Search history…"). It searches your executed commands and their original plain-English requests. Each row offers Send to input, Save as runbook, and Copy. Clear empties the history.

Terminal scrollback search (⌘F)

⌘F opens Find in terminal, searching the whole scrollback. A counter shows your position (for example 1/5); move between matches with ⌘G (next) and ⌘⇧G (previous), or press Return in the search field for the next match. Esc closes it.

Command marks (⌘↑ / ⌘↓)

⌘↑ and ⌘↓ jump between command starts in the scrollback, scrolling to each command's first line. This navigates command boundaries — it isn't a text search.

Semantic history search (Pro)

Semantic history is Pro. It adds an on-device "Related by meaning" group to the ⌘K palette for cases where your search words don't literally appear in the command. It's conservative by design:

• Ordinary lexical matches always come first and are ranked on their own.
• "Related by meaning" is a separate, labeled group (capped to a few entries) for commands with no word overlap but a close meaning — a weak semantic match never outranks a precise lexical hit.
• It runs entirely on-device (Apple's on-device text embeddings); the index is keyed by a hash and stores no command text, and nothing is ever sent to a provider.

Related pages: Privacy and Data Handling, Runbooks, Free vs. Pro.