Tactics from someone using Recall every day
🔎
Search first, never scroll
A typed word beats your scroll wheel against 150,000+ messages. Build the reflex.
✏️
Alias the day you finish
A bare UUID is forgettable in a week. Spend 5 seconds naming the session while context is fresh.
⭐
Pin canonical decisions
The ★ floats a session to the top of its project. Pin "the auth decisions" so they are always first.
📝
Notes as executive summary
3 bullets after the session: what we decided, what code changed, what is unresolved. Re-read in 30 seconds three months later.
⛓️
Chain context with --prelude
The prelude tells Claude what to DO with the context, otherwise it summarizes instead of continuing.
recall context abc12345 --prelude "continue the migration" | claude📦
Dotfile your ~/.recall
Commit aliases.json and notes/ to dotfiles. Your session names and personal notes follow you across machines.
🎯
Search for decisions, not keywords
You write phrases like "decided", "final answer", "lets go with" when you commit to something. Searching them surfaces decision moments.
recall search "decided"Pro tips
Hero above lists every tip with its command. Two more advanced moves:
#Combine threads + neighborhood
bash
recall neighborhood <id> -b 8000 | claudePulls the session plus its parents, children, citations, and similar sessions, budget-bounded. Higher token budget = more context.
#Dotfile your ~/.recall
Commit ~/.recall/aliases.json and ~/.recall/notes/ to your dotfiles repo. Your session names and personal notes follow you across machines. The SQLite index rebuilds itself on a new machine; the metadata is what's hard to recreate.