Searchlight

Searchlight: Historical Session Viewer — a modern .NET 10 / WinUI 3 Windows app that shows a read-only GUI of your recent AI coding-agent sessions and lets you resume any of them with one click.

Today it reads GitHub Copilot sessions from ~/.copilot/. The data layer is agent-neutral by design — support for other agents (e.g. Claude Code) is a planned extension.

Status: feature-complete and running. A WinUI host + a platform-neutral Core library + an xUnit test project (36 tests green).

Screenshot

Captured using the Demo build config (synthetic data) so no proprietary session content is shown.

What it does

• Frequency-sorted session list with recency group headers (Last 2h / 4h / 8h / 16h / 32h, then grouped by day).
• Lazy section tabs — Details displays all parsed native session/workspace/event metadata and first/last prompt previews; Agent tasks and Checkpoints load only when opened.
• Native Copilot sources only — no custom journaling extension or status-snapshot hook required. Missing optional metadata is shown explicitly.
• One-click Resume — hands off to copilot --resume=<id> in Windows Terminal.
• System tray — lives in the tray like ScriptTray; hides on close, exits from the tray menu.
• Read-only by design — never writes to ~/.copilot.

Quick start

# Build the whole solution
dotnet build Searchlight.slnx -c Debug

# Run the unit tests (platform-neutral, no WinUI needed)
dotnet test src/Searchlight.Core.Tests/Searchlight.Core.Tests.csproj

# Run against your real sessions
dotnet run --project src/Searchlight -c Debug

# Run against synthetic data (safe for screenshots)
dotnet run --project src/Searchlight -c Demo

Requires the .NET 10 SDK (pinned via global.json) on Windows.

Run modes

Mode	How	Data source
Tray (default)	dotnet run --project src/Searchlight	Live ~/.copilot
No tray	append --no-tray	Live ~/.copilot
Demo / mock	Demo build config, or --demo flag	Synthetic (15 sessions)

MSIX distribution and local review

Build and sideload Searchlight Dev alongside the production package. The channels have separate app identities and share settings and notes in %USERPROFILE%\.searchlight. See MSIX builds and signing for certificate setup and the complete workflow.

$build = .\tools\Build-Msix.ps1 -CertificateThumbprint '<your-development-certificate-thumbprint>'
.\tools\Install-DevMsix.ps1 -Path $build.Path

Unpackaged install & launch

To run Searchlight without dotnet run — from the Start Menu, a desktop icon, or automatically at login — use the installer script. It publishes a self-contained build (no .NET runtime required on the target) to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Searchlight\app and creates shortcuts:

# Install: publish + Start Menu + desktop + run-at-login shortcuts
pwsh -File tools/install.ps1

# Uninstall: remove all shortcuts and the install folder
pwsh -File tools/install.ps1 -Action Uninstall

After installing:

• Launch on demand — press the Win key and type Searchlight, or use the desktop icon.
• At login — it starts automatically and sits in the system tray (a Startup shortcut is created on first installation). Production's Settings can turn this off; updates retain your choice. Dev has no auto-start option.
• Single instance — launching again (e.g. clicking the icon while it's already running at login) just surfaces the existing window instead of adding a second tray icon.

Installer switches:

Switch	Effect
-NoDesktop	Skip the desktop shortcut
-NoStartup	Skip the run-at-login (Startup) shortcut
-SkipPublish	Reuse the last published output (faster re-install)
-Configuration Debug	Publish a Debug build instead of Release

Documentation

Full knowledge base in docs/:

• architecture.md — layered architecture, DI composition root, data flow
• engineering.md — build configs, compile flags, run modes, commands
• data-model.md — ~/.copilot sources and the in-memory domain model
• msix.md — package identities, shared data, signing, and Dev sideloads

License

MIT