Search

Wintty has an in-terminal search UI so you can find text in the visible screen and the scrollback without piping output through grep or scrolling by hand. Search works on any cell of the terminal: prompt output, command history, TUI program contents, anything currently in the terminal buffer.

Press ctrl+shift+f to open the search UI. On Windows, plain ctrl+f is deliberately left free: it is the find bar of the raw config editor in Settings. Once the UI is open, type a search term and press enter (or use the navigation actions below) to highlight matches.

On Linux that chord is bound to the start_search action, and you can move it to a chord you prefer:

keybind = ctrl+alt+f=start_search

Note

Windows is the exception. There the app matches ctrl+shift+f itself and opens the search bar directly. The start_search action still reaches the app, but its handler only fills in the search box's query text and never shows the bar, so binding start_search to a chord of your own does nothing visible. The search chord cannot currently be moved off ctrl+shift+f on Windows.

If you already have text selected, you can start a search for that selection with search_selection:

keybind = ctrl+shift+g=search_selection

This is convenient for "find the next place this identifier appears in my scrollback" workflows.

Note

On Windows search_selection runs through the same handler as start_search, so it fills the search box with the selected text but does not show the search bar. Open the bar with ctrl+shift+f to see the query and the match counter.

Once a search is active, jump between matches with navigate_search:

keybind = enter=navigate_search:next
keybind = shift+enter=navigate_search:previous

The viewport scrolls automatically to keep the active match visible.

The search action takes a literal search string and starts a search for that exact text. It runs in the terminal itself and highlights matches; it does not open the search UI on any platform. That makes it useful from the command palette or from external automation:

command-palette-entry = title:Find TODOs, action:search:TODO

On Windows, running that entry highlights the matches but shows no search bar and no match counter, so pair it with navigate_search to step through the results.

Passing an empty string to search cancels the in-progress search. It does not hide the UI on its own; for that, use end_search.

end_search closes the search UI and clears match highlights:

keybind = escape=end_search

escape = end_search is already in the default keybindings on all three platforms, so you usually don't need to bind this yourself.

Action	Purpose
start_search	Open the search UI (does not open it on Windows; see above)
search	Start a search for a literal string, without opening the UI
search_selection	Search for the current selection (fills the query box only on Windows)
navigate_search	Jump to the previous or next match
end_search	Close the search UI and clear highlights