Quick Find
Quick Find is one overlay that searches across everything Kangentic knows about - tasks, backlog items, session events, projects, and your agents’ past conversations - without leaving the board.
Opening the Palette
Section titled “Opening the Palette”| Shortcut | Where it works |
|---|---|
| Ctrl+Shift+F / Cmd+Shift+F | Anywhere in the app |
| Ctrl+F / Cmd+F | Opens the palette when you’re not on the board view; on the board it focuses the toolbar’s board search instead. Suppressed inside focused text fields |
| ⌘ icon in the title bar | Click to open |
Press Escape to close.
What It Searches
Section titled “What It Searches”| Source | Match against |
|---|---|
| Tasks (active and archived) | Title and description |
| Backlog items | Title and description |
| Session events | Tool calls and agent activity from each session’s events.jsonl (user-prompt text is not indexed) |
| Projects | Name and path of every registered project |
| Conversations | The structured transcript of every past agent session - user turns, assistant replies, and tool-call summaries - from the local Conversation Memory index. Appears when memory indexing is on (the default) |
Results are grouped by kind with keyboard navigation (arrow keys to move, Enter to open).
Finding a task by its ticket number
Section titled “Finding a task by its ticket number”Added in v0.36.0. Type # followed by digits (#42) and the search becomes a ticket lookup: it matches tasks by the #N number shown on their cards and skips every other source, since backlog items, projects, events, and conversations are not tickets.
The match is a prefix, so the list narrows as you type: #4 finds #4, #40, #41, #400, and the exact number sorts first. Active tasks rank ahead of archived ones. A bare number with no # stays an ordinary text search, so a task whose title contains a number keeps being findable that way.
The same syntax works in the board toolbar’s search box and in the kangentic_search and kangentic_search_tasks MCP tools, so an agent handed “look at #128” can find the task without knowing its title.
Keyword vs Smart mode
Section titled “Keyword vs Smart mode”The Conversations group has two matching modes, auto-selected from your Memory settings - there is no per-search toggle:
- Keyword (default) - fast lexical full-text search.
- Smart - a hybrid that fuses keyword matching with local semantic (embedding) search, so a query finds conversations by meaning even when the wording differs. Enabled when Semantic search is turned on in the Memory tab.
Every other source (tasks, backlog, events, projects) always matches by keyword; the mode only affects conversations.
The default scope is the current project. Toggle to All projects to widen the search across every registered project. The “All projects” mode is what makes the palette especially useful for cross-cutting work - e.g., finding every task that mentions a particular file across multiple repos you’re juggling.
Selecting a Result
Section titled “Selecting a Result”Each kind opens to the most useful surface:
| Hit | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Task | Opens the task detail dialog. Switches projects first if needed |
| Backlog item | Switches to the backlog view in the owning project and opens the item’s edit dialog |
| Session event | Switches to the right project and task, then scrolls the Activity Log to the matched event with a brief highlight |
| Project | Switches to that project |
| Conversation | Opens the read-only conversation viewer scrolled to the matched turn (briefly highlighted). If that session is still running, it routes you to the live terminal instead |
Board Toolbar Search and Filter
Section titled “Board Toolbar Search and Filter”The palette is for cross-cutting search. For filtering the current board only, use the docked search box and Filter button in the board toolbar - they live-filter the visible columns by text, priority, and label. The same toolbar serves the backlog view. See Agent Orchestration > Board Search and Filtering.
MCP Tool
Section titled “MCP Tool”Agents can perform the same unified search - including recalling past conversations by keyword or meaning - via the kangentic_search MCP tool. See the MCP Server reference.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”See also:
- Creating Tasks - the work that ends up in search results
- Backlog - palette searches both tasks and backlog items
- Shortcuts - add custom commands to the task detail dialog
Kangentic is free and open source. A star helps other people find it.
Star on GitHub