[Feature]: Chapters — save selected terminal output as durable bookmarks that survive scrollback trims

[samithaj]

Problem or use case

Long Claude Code / Codex sessions in the regular terminal produce thousands of lines. The outputs I actually need again — a final answer, a decision, a command that worked — get buried, and then disappear entirely once scrollback trims: the renderer ring buffer at 5k rows by default, the daemon's 5k-row cap (#12864), checkpoint byte caps and log-cap rotation (#17114), recovery snapshots (#14593).

Today there is no way to keep a handful of important outputs reachable. Terminal Search only covers what is still in the buffer, and scrolling back through hours of tool output is slow.

Proposed solution

Chapters: user-chosen, durable bookmarks on terminal output.

• Select text in a terminal pane → right-click → Save selection as chapter (plus a configurable shortcut). Title defaults to the first line and is editable.
• A new Chapters tab in the right sidebar (alongside Explorer / Agents / Source Control / Checks) lists the active worktree's chapters, grouped by terminal, newest first.
• Click a chapter: if the text is still in that pane's scrollback, scroll it to the top of the viewport and briefly highlight it; otherwise open the saved copy in a read-only view inside the panel — a chapter never goes dead.
• Durability: each chapter stores the captured text plus a content hash, pane identity, timestamp, and the agent session id when known. Persisted per worktree, so it survives terminal close and app restart.
• Recovery: when the pane ran a known agent (Claude Code, Codex, …) and the output is gone, Orca looks the snippet up in that session's transcript — the same files Agent Session History already discovers, including on SSH hosts — and shows the full untruncated message.
• Search: the Chapters tab has a search box that full-text searches saved chapters immediately, and — once transcript search ([Feature]: Full-text search over agent conversations (Cmd+J indexes metadata only; AI Vault search stops at the 5-message preview) #17422 / feat(ai-vault): local full-text search over agent session history #18112) lands — the worktree's agent transcripts too, so past agent output remains findable even after the terminal trimmed it, with a one-click "Save as chapter" on any hit.
• Agent-neutral capture (from the xterm buffer); transcript recovery and search are per-provider enhancements. Works in folder workspaces and SSH worktrees.

Alternatives or additional context

• [Feature]: Conversation outline — a jump-to table of contents for my own prompts in a session #11632 proposes an auto-generated outline of user prompts for native chat and lists terminal mode as a harder follow-up; this is the manual, terminal-mode complement (user-chosen anchors, durable across trims).
• [Feature]: Support navigation marks and previous/next mark keybindings in regular terminals #15981 proposes OSC SetMark navigation marks that are intentionally disposed on trim — complementary jump UX, opposite durability model.
• [Feature]: Full-text search over agent conversations (Cmd+J indexes metadata only; AI Vault search stops at the 5-message preview) #17422 / feat(ai-vault): local full-text search over agent session history #18112 / feat(ai-vault): add full-transcript content search to Agent Session History #18393 add transcript search; this feature reuses that rather than building a second index.
• Searched issues, discussions, PRs and branches for bookmark / chapter / pin / outline / annotation — no existing request.
• I'm implementing this; PR to follow.