**FTS5 Session Search** is a feature of 📝Hermes Agent that gives the agent a built-in session_search tool for full-text search across all past conversations, using SQLite's FTS5 engine over the session store in ~/.hermes/state.db. The agent can also scroll through any session it finds, and the tool makes no LLM calls: it returns views of actual messages from the database rather than generated summaries.
📝Hermes Persistent Memory carries about 1,300 tokens of key facts into every prompt; session search reaches every stored CLI and messaging session on demand, so the agent can find things discussed weeks ago that are not in its active memory.
It serves anyone who expects Hermes to recall earlier work without repeating themselves: the agent is prompted to search when a user references a past conversation or relevant prior context seems likely.
Key Capabilities
- Discovery — a
queryruns FTS5, dedupes hits by session lineage and returns the top sessions, by default fully hydrating only the highest-ranked result with its context. - Scroll and read — a
session_idwitharound_message_idreturns a window of messages around that anchor; asession_idalone returns the session or a head/tail view. - Browse — calling the tool with no arguments lists recent sessions chronologically with titles, previews and timestamps, for questions about recent work with no named topic.
- FTS5 query syntax — plain keywords combine with an implicit AND, and queries also accept quoted phrases,
ORandNOToperators, and prefix matches such asdeploy*. - Ranking controls — optional
sort(newestoroldest),detail(adaptiveorfull) androle_filter; discovery searches user and assistant messages by default.
Getting Started
- Use Hermes from the CLI or a messaging platform; sessions are stored in
~/.hermes/state.db. - Ask about a past conversation; the agent is prompted to call
session_searchon its own. - Browse stored sessions yourself with
hermes sessions list.