Finding work you vaguely remember
You remember fixing something last week but not the project, the app or the conversation. Hina's search covers the titles, page paths and prompts it recorded, and a date word narrows the range. Here is how to phrase a query and what to check when nothing matches.
What the search actually looks at
Click the magnifying glass at the top of the window or press Command-F to open Search records. It searches the activity Hina recorded, meaning app names, window titles and document names, plus the prompts you sent to Claude Code, Codex or Cursor when Read agent sessions is on. It does not read page bodies, screenshots, assistant replies or tool output, and it builds no separate index, so a sentence that appeared only inside a page was never there to find.
The range picker matters more than most people expect. It offers 7, 30 and 90 days, and 30 is the default. A match from five weeks ago is invisible at 30 days, and a date you type only narrows the selected range and never widens it. Search also depends on titles having been recorded. If Record window titles and page paths was off that week, those days hold app names only.
If you have no word at all, open the search and leave the box empty. Recent clues lists up to six recent records that carry a title, a page or a prompt, without repeating the same one, which is often enough to jog a memory. Search is available during the trial of seven recorded days and after you activate a license. When it is locked, recording continues and the history stays intact.
Phrasing a query
Every word has to appear somewhere in the same record, and the words may land in different fields: the app name, the title or document, or the prompt text and its project. Case, accents and full-width characters are ignored. Pick a word that belongs to the task rather than the tool, such as export, a font name or part of a filename. Searching for Chrome returns most of your week.
Add a date word to narrow the window. Hina understands today, yesterday, the day before yesterday, this week, last week, this month, last month, 3 days ago, a full date such as 2026-09-12, and Chinese equivalents of those phrases. A query like yesterday export searches only that day. Weeks start on Monday, and days run from 4 a.m. to 4 a.m.
Only one date is read as a date. If you type two, or a date that sits inside a URL, an identifier or a longer word, Hina treats them as ordinary keywords. To search for a title that really contains the word yesterday, put it in double quotes and it is matched literally.
Reading a result
Each hit shows its time, a source label (Activity or AI prompt) and the app, title or prompt text. Long prompts are cut around the matching words and open in full when you click them. Consecutive samples of the same window are merged into one stretch with their seconds added up, so a long session in one document is a single row instead of dozens.
Open a hit to see Nearby records, which lists up to two records before and two after, within 10 minutes and the same workday. The panel is labelled as not necessarily related, and that is accurate. Two things happening close together is a clue about where to look next, not evidence that one led to the other. View this day's timeline jumps to that day in the Trail, where you can read the surrounding hours with their durations.
Prompts carry no duration. The time shown on a hit counts activity only, so an AI prompt tells you when you asked something and not how long you spent on it.
A worked example
Suppose you remember changing an export format sometime last week. With the range at 30 days, type last week export. If a window title or a prompt contains the word, it appears with its day. If nothing does, drop the date word and search export alone, because the title may say CSV or Download and the word export may exist only in a prompt. If that still returns nothing, try the project name, then open one hit's day timeline and read what happened around it.
Now suppose you remember the day but not any word. Type the date on its own, such as 2026-09-12, or last week, and every record in that range is listed, newest first. Read down the list, expand the ones that look familiar, and use the day timeline to see them in order. Because a date alone matches everything, this works best for a single day or a short window, not for a whole month.
When nothing comes back
Read the message under the search box before trying another word. An empty result says No matches and suggests fewer keywords or a wider date range, and a date outside the selected range also comes back empty. Hina also says when activity records or AI history could not be read, when AI history is turned off, and when a hit has only the app name. That last one means titles were off when it was captured, or a rule such as a password manager, a private window or a hide pattern removed the title, and no later setting can bring it back.
Gaps in the record are the other cause. If Hina was paused, not running or the Mac was asleep, nothing was captured for that stretch, so a missing result does not show that the work never happened. Use the command line to widen the date range or read results from a script. Hina --search uses the same matching rules, searches the last 14 days by default and accepts --days to widen that, but it is meant for scripts and AI assistants more than for everyday use.