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sessions: the ⌕ matched-prompt snippet is visually indistinguishable from the first-message line #138

Description

@grimmerk

Symptom

While searching, some rows show an extra grey line that reads like a second copy of the first-user-message line — but with unfamiliar content and a #N prefix:

git                                                         43 msgs  33d ago
/effort max  →  可 retry 了
⌕ #3 我想請你幫我 study 看有什麼不錯的辦法可以用我們公司 Fireflies 內部員工其 staging/productio…

Reported by the author while testing PR #137, having forgotten what the line was — and reading the leading glyph as and then ρ.

It is not a bug — it is the matched-prompt snippet from PR #132

That line is the ⌕ #N …context… snippet: when a search hit lands in a middle prompt, which the row never displays, this line shows why the row matched. #3 is the prompt index (the 3rd thing you typed in that session). It is gated on an active search, which is why it only appears while searching.

Working exactly as designed. The defect is that it does not look like what it is.

The actual defect: it is visually indistinguishable from the first-message line

Row line Colour Size
first user message #999 12px
matched snippet #999 11px
last user message #c89030 12px
last assistant reply #9DC8E0 11px

The snippet is the same grey as the first-message line, one pixel smaller. Every other line in the row has its own colour and its own leading marker (, ), so the snippet is the only one that reads as a duplicate of a neighbour rather than as its own kind of information.

Two contributing problems:

  1. Colour collision#999 is already spoken for by the first-message line, so the eye files the snippet under "another first message".
  2. The glyph is illegible at 11px — U+2315 renders as a small circle with a tail; it was read as and as ρ in the same session. It carries the whole "this is a search hit" signal and cannot be read.

Suggested fix

Give the snippet line its own visual identity, in the same pass as the other row-readability work:

  • a distinct colour that is not the first-message grey (it is a search affordance, so the amber of SEARCH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLE is the natural family)
  • a legible marker — a plain 🔍, or the word match, or at a size where it resolves
  • consider showing which field matched once the search covers title/branch too (⌕ title: / ⌕ #3), since a snippet with no field label cannot say where the hit came from

Notes

🤖 On behalf of @grimmerk — generated with Claude Code

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