Pro tips

Search first, never scroll

The reflex from scrollback-limited terminals is to scroll through sessions looking for something. Don't. Use the search box. With 150,000+ indexed messages, a typed word is faster than your scroll wheel.

Alias your sessions the day you finish them

A session with no alias is abc12345 — useless a week from now. Spend 5 seconds naming it "auth middleware refactor" while the context is fresh. Your future self thanks you.

Pin sessions you reference often

The ★ in every session row pins it to the top of the project list. Pin your "canonical decisions" sessions so they're always first.

Use notes as an executive summary

After finishing a session, write a 3-bullet note: what did we decide, what code changed, what's unresolved. In 3 months you'll re-read that note in 30 seconds instead of scrolling 10,000 lines.

Chain context re-injection with prelude

recall context abc12345 \
  --prelude "This is context from last week. Continue from where we left off and help me finish the migration." \
  | claude

The prelude instructs Claude about how to use the context — otherwise it might just summarize the transcript instead of continuing the work.

Keep ~/.recall/ in a dotfiles repo

Commit your ~/.recall/aliases.json and ~/.recall/notes/ to your dotfiles repo. Your session names and personal notes follow you across machines.

Search for decisions, not just keywords

recall search "decided"
recall search "final answer"
recall search "lets go with"

You write these phrases when you commit to something. Searching for them surfaces the decision moments buried in long sessions.