chat: the @ list finds every open conversation, on every box, with spaces in the search

[ZeroPoint95]

A tab reading cloudfl… was on the strip and @chat:cloudfl did not list it. The match was fine; what the list held, and where it was offered, was not.

This is fixed now

What changed

• Recent conversations are read on every opening of the list, not once per process. A conversation started in another window after the window's first @, or named after it, was never on the list for as long as the window lived.
• @chat: and @team: keep up to thirty-two rows and scroll, instead of the first eight with no sign of the rest. The bare @ still keeps eight per section beside the tasks and files.
• Recent rows are keyed by the canonical transcript, the way tabs are, so a home reached through a symlink no longer lists the conversation in front, or every open tab a second time, as recent rows.
• The new-chat page (+ / ctrl+t) leaves no conversation off. It opens no file, so the window still carried the conversation it came from as the one in front and left it off as if you were typing inside it — @chat:kim beside a lit tell me about kim jong il said no conversation matches.
• Home's box opens the same list: the prefix words, the teams and conversations sections above the files, the same prefixes, the same recents refresh, and the same choosing code (completeTeamIn, completeChatIn) as a conversation's box. Home leaves no conversation off, because its sentence opens a new one.
• The words after @ may have spaces. @chat:who found who is kim jong il and @chat:who is closed the list. The token walks back over up to three spaces to the nearest @ that begins a word, and every word must match, in any order, on teams, conversations and files alike: @chat:who is, @team:har bor, @file:tui3 app. Only the last word, the one still being typed, may match by its letters in order; the finished words before it match whole. Several words that match nothing close the list, and the words typed after a mention the list just inserted never reopen it.
• The manual says what the list holds (every open tab except the one you are in, then the twenty most recent in this project; older ones and other projects' are reached with /resume), the spaces rule, and that home and the new-chat page have the same list.

Tests

TestTheAtListIsTheSameOnEveryBox drives one fixture and the same searches through a conversation's box, home's box and the new-chat page's box, so the three cannot drift apart. The rest: recents re-read on each opening (conversation and home), the scoped cap, canonical keys, the start page, atToken with spaces, every-word matching with the finished-word rule, and the sentence after a chosen mention staying in the box and being sent whole.

Verified in the real binary with the tmux rig and a stub model: a conversation named in a second window showing up in the first window's @chat: list, home's list with its sections, the start-page case from the owner's screenshot, and the spaced searches.

Not done: the task section's own scorer (session.SearchTaskIndex) still treats a spaced needle as one phrase. Matching the words of a transcript rather than only its title is not in this change.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[AbirAbbas]

Taking over: drove the real binary on both roads (plain codeaf and codeaf chat --no-host) with two windows on one project, a 6,700-path project and a 400-conversation project. The core of the PR holds: a conversation named in window B shows up in window A's @chat: without a restart, the start page offers the conversation it came from, @chat:/@team: scroll past eight rows, spaced prefixed searches work on every box, and a symlinked home no longer lists the conversation in front (origin/dev did). Fixed what broke along the way:

• 7ff632a5f — a bare @ ends at a space again; spaces belong to @team:/@chat:/@file: searches. The three-space walk-back made ordinary prose open the list: cc @ara on this landed on bench/oneroad/marathon/finish.sh, and pressing enter swapped the sentence for that path (about 15% of sampled ask @name … sentences did it). Same commit: home's @ list could panic with index out of range [0] with length 0 (origin/dev too) when its folder changed under rows already ranked; a pasted opening on home skipped the catalogs and reads; recent keys were canonicalised on the update loop; a comma after a chosen mention reopened the list; home drew a chosen team without its colour.
• 8576f65dc — home's @ files come from the folder the sentence opens in (the one the foot names), not from the project row the cursor was on before typing; a pasted opening reads recents again; team colour comes from the current catalog; the window's own unsent conversation, named only by its draft, is not offered as a mention.
• 1777c5fa6 — one recent read per @ opening (typing @chat:no such words read the list ten times). Home's box emptied by backspace kept its list "open", so the next @ read nothing, and a conversation started in another window never showed on home (your head did this too). An arriving read keeps a row you picked with the arrows, otherwise selects the best match. Esc then a letter is a new opening, which is what TestAtOnHomeReadsRecentConversationsOnEachOpening expects.
• 58a967cec — at most one recent walk in flight (a burst of @ openings could start dozens of concurrent walks, each reading every session's meta.json); esc then punctuation on a bare @ stays closed.
• c990d613a, 1599add2c — merged dev, including chat: onboarding answers the pointer and a second enter, no telemetry notice or command, and free models only on a low account #1720. No overlap problems on the welcome page or home.

The manual pages and the change entry say all of the above. Left for later: switching conversations while a recent read is still in flight and then typing @ at the same position in the new box can reuse the old project's rows for that one opening. Also, every opening re-reads every session's meta.json in the project (same cost as one home refresh), with no cache keyed on the folder.

[AbirAbbas]

Verified and taken over; merging.