Search Commands

Search across problems, solutions, critiques, findings, milestones, and events. Supports both text search and entity reference-based similarity search.

Search requires the SQLite cache at .jj/jjj.db. Full-text search and embeddings are indexes, not stored data, so unlike the rest of jjj these commands cannot fall back to walking the markdown. jjj search syncs the cache itself; the --search flags on problem list, solution list, critique list and finding list update it incrementally but need the file to exist already. If a --search filter reports no index, run jjj db rebuild once.

This is also why JJJ_NO_DB=1 does not affect these commands: it is a read-path measurement switch for the paths that have a fallback.

For filtering rather than searching — by status, tag, author, assignee — use jjj query, which needs no cache.

`jjj search`

jjj search <query> [options]

The search query can be free text or an entity reference (e.g., p/01957d) for similarity search.

Options:

Option	Type	Description
`<query>`	string	Search query or entity reference for similarity search
`--type`, `-t`	string	Filter by entity type: `problem`, `solution`, `critique`, `milestone`, `event`
`--text-only`	flag	Force text-only search (disable semantic/embedding features)
`--json`	flag	Output results as JSON

Examples:

# Search for anything mentioning "authentication"
jjj search "authentication"

# Search only problems
jjj search "login bug" --type problem

# Find entities similar to a specific problem
jjj search p/01957d

# Text-only search with JSON output
jjj search "refactor" --text-only --json