In-Session Transcript Search¶

Press Ctrl+O to enter transcript mode in a Claude Code session, then use /, n, and N to jump to specific moments instead of scrolling linearly.

Long agent sessions make linear scrollback hostile. A one-hour Claude Code session can emit thousands of tool-output lines; recalling the moment a plan changed, a tool first errored, or a specific file was touched means re-reading until you find it. Transcript-mode search collapses that to a keystroke, and when fullscreen rendering is active it is the only way to search the conversation at all.

What the Surface Provides¶

Ctrl+O toggles transcript mode — the view that shows verbose tool calls and output instead of the collapsed default. Inside transcript mode, navigation is less-style (fullscreen reference) — the same /-then-n/N pattern documented in the GNU less manual and inherited by git log, man, and other pagers:

Key	Action
`/`	Open search; type a substring, `Enter` to accept, `Esc` to cancel
`n` / `N`	Jump to next / previous match after the search bar closes
`j` / `k` or arrows	Scroll one line
`g` / `G`	Jump to top or bottom
`Ctrl+u` / `Ctrl+d`	Half-page scroll
`Space` / `b`	Full-page scroll
`[`	Write the full conversation to the terminal's native scrollback
`v`	Dump the conversation to `$VISUAL` or `$EDITOR`
`q` / `Esc` / `Ctrl+o`	Exit transcript mode

Transcript search shipped in Claude Code v2.1.83 (2026-03-25): "Added transcript search — press / in transcript mode (Ctrl+O) to search, n/N to step through matches" (changelog). Ctrl+O was refined in v2.1.110 to toggle transcript mode only; the focus view moved to the separate /focus command (changelog).

Anchors That Make Search Useful¶

Search is cheapest when you know what string to type. Useful anchors in a Claude Code transcript:

Tool error text — Error, exit code, ENOENT, timeout
Plan revision boundaries — /plan, the title of the plan file, or the phrase you used to request a new plan
File-first-touched — the filename; the first hit is where the agent first read or edited it
Prompt boundaries — a phrase from your own input; jump backward from the current turn to find where a topic started
Scheduled-task timestamps — v2.1.84 added timestamp markers whenever /loop or CronCreate fires, which become natural section markers in long sessions (changelog)

When Search Is the Wrong Tool¶

Transcript search is session-scoped, substring-only, and lives in the fullscreen alternate screen buffer. It is not a replacement for:

Cross-session investigation. Matching a symptom across multiple saved sessions requires grepping transcripts on disk or structured telemetry — see Agent Observability: OTel, Cost Tracking, and Trajectory Logging.
Post-mortem analysis. Once a session exits, the in-memory buffer is gone. Retrospective review of what the agent did and why belongs to Using the Agent to Analyze Its Own Evaluation Transcripts.
Legacy (non-fullscreen) rendering. Fullscreen mode is opt-in via /tui fullscreen or CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1. In the default renderer the conversation is in the terminal's native scrollback, so Cmd+F and tmux copy mode already work; transcript-mode search does not apply (fullscreen reference).
Noisy sessions. Substring search with no event-type filter surfaces every occurrence of generic tokens like error or test. For verbose builds or read-heavy sessions, use [ to dump the conversation to the terminal's scrollback and grep it, or redirect the analysis to an offline transcript pass.

Example¶

A 90-minute session fixing an auth race condition touched twelve files, ran the test suite six times, and produced one plan revision after the third failure. Recovering the plan-revision moment by scrolling is slow; by search it is one keystroke:

Ctrl+O                    → enter transcript mode
/plan                     → first match: initial planning turn
n                         → skip to plan-revision turn
n                         → skip to post-revision edits
Esc                       → exit search
[                         → dump to terminal scrollback for Cmd+F across the session
q                         → return to prompt

The same pattern applies to finding the first occurrence of a test failure (/FAIL), the moment a specific file was first edited (/<filename>), or the turn where a scheduled task fired (/loop or the task-timestamp string).

Key Takeaways¶

Transcript search is in-session navigation, not persistent observability — it complements OTel traces and offline transcript analysis rather than replacing them
Ctrl+O toggles transcript mode; /, n, N provide less-style search and match stepping
[ writes the full conversation into the terminal's native scrollback as an escape hatch into Cmd+F, tmux copy mode, and other native tools
Fullscreen rendering must be on (/tui fullscreen or CLAUDE_CODE_NO_FLICKER=1) for transcript-mode search to exist
Search is session-scoped and substring-only — cross-session and post-mortem work belong to different tools