Search & navigation

Press ⌘K (or Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux) anywhere in Openbook. One box does two jobs: it jumps you to a place, and it searches the text of your work.

There is nothing to set up, and no query language. Type what you remember.

Two modes, one box

The box opens in quick navigation, a list of places and things matched on their names. It is for moving: a few letters of a room's name and Enter is faster than scanning the sidebar.

Inside a workspace, the first entry is Search your work. Choose it — or just press Enter on it — and the same dialog becomes a full search over the contents of what you can read. Quick navigation at the bottom takes you back.

Escape unwinds one step at a time: it closes a preview, then returns to quick navigation, then closes the box. Your keyboard focus goes back where it was.

Quick navigation finds names

Results	Reach
Workspaces	Every workspace you belong to
Rooms	Every room in every workspace you belong to, current workspace first
Cards on this board	The board you are looking at
Forum topics, Feed posts, Q&A questions	The current workspace, by title
Recent	The rooms you visited most recently, shown when the box is empty
Navigation	Workspace home, workspace settings, AI settings

Recent results are checked against the rooms you can currently reach, so a room you lost access to never appears.

Searching your work

This searches body text, not just titles, across eleven kinds of content:

	What is searched
Doc	The title and the body of a document or wiki page
Card	The title and the description
Card comment	The comment itself
Message	Chat message text
Discussion / Discussion reply	Topic titles, and the text of replies
Feed post	The post
Question / Answer	The question's title and body, and answers
Agent outcome	What an agent run concluded
Direct message	Your own DMs, in the My conversations scope only

Matching is plain substring matching, so bital finds orbital. Up to twelve words of a query are used.

Choose how wide to look

The scope row comes first, because it decides everything else:

• This room — offered only when you are in one, and named after it.
• This workspace — every room here that you can open.
• All my workspaces — the workspaces you have joined. A workspace you could join but have not is not searched, and the page says so every time.
• My conversations — your own direct messages and private threads. This is the only scope that reaches DMs, and it offers no type filters, because it is already one kind of thing.

Then narrow by type: All, Docs and wiki, Messages, Cards, Discussions, Q and A, Agent outcomes.

Your query, scope and type are remembered per workspace, so coming back to a search you ran this morning does not mean typing it again.

The line that tells you what was actually searched

Above the results, one sentence states the reach of the search you just ran — "Searched 14 rooms you can open in Acme Rockets", or "Searched your own direct messages and private threads". Underneath, in amber, anything that went wrong:

<Type> results may be incomplete because there were more matches than one search reads at once.

That happens. A search reads at most 200 candidates, 60 rooms per workspace, and six workspaces at a time, and it gives up after two seconds rather than hanging. When it hits one of those, it says which, instead of quietly showing you a shorter list.

The same honesty runs through the empty state. It does not say "no results"; it says "No matches you can see in this workspace", followed by "This covers what was searched above. It does not mean nothing exists." — and offers to widen the scope for you.

There is no total hit count anywhere in the interface, and that is deliberate. A count on the screen counts the rows on the screen. A number that included things you are not allowed to read would tell you they exist.

Reading a result without leaving

Selecting a result opens a preview beside the list. Arrow keys move, Enter opens. The preview re-reads the item from the server, so you are never reading a stale snippet from when the search ran — and if it changed in between, it tells you: "This source changed since the search ran. The text below is the current version."

More results pages through twenty at a time. The Open button is as precise as the link can be: Open card, Open discussion, Open question, and otherwise Open room, with a note saying so rather than pretending the deep link exists.

What you can and cannot see

Every room is decided individually, by exactly the same rule that decides whether you can open it normally. Only rooms you can open are searched, counted or named.

Nothing ever describes what was withheld. There is no denied-room count and no "three more results in rooms you cannot see". A workspace you cannot read answers the same way as a workspace that does not exist, so search cannot be used to find out what exists.

Chat has two extra conditions on top of the room rule: the conversation's own membership, and your plan's history window. Messages older than that window are not searched.

Limits

Query length	300 characters
Results per page	20
Candidates read per search	200
Rooms read per workspace	60
Workspaces in All my workspaces	6
Time budget	2 seconds

Tips

• Start narrow. A room search is faster and easier to read, and the empty state offers to widen it in one click.
• Read the amber line. It is the difference between "this does not exist" and "this search did not reach it".
• Use ⌘K to move, Enter to search. Two habits, one key.

Related

Search gets you to things you go looking for; notifications bring things to you — see Notifications.

Once you have found something, every room and card has a stable, shareable URL — see Sharing & links.