Add in-conversation Find (Ctrl/Cmd+F) to the Claude Code VS Code extension

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

The Claude Code chat panel in VS Code has no text search. Long conversations — particularly agentic sessions with extensive tool output, code blocks, and multi-turn debugging — become effectively unsearchable. VS Code's native Ctrl+F doesn't reach into the extension's webview, so users must scroll manually or copy the transcript out to grep it. This degrades the value of long-running sessions, which are otherwise one of Claude Code's strengths.

Proposed Solution

A find widget scoped to the conversation panel, invoked with Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on macOS) while the panel is focused, matching VS Code's own find UX conventions.

Acceptance criteria

Ctrl/Cmd+F opens a find widget anchored to the conversation panel; Esc closes it and clears highlights.
Search operates over the underlying conversation data store, not the rendered DOM. Matches in messages that are not currently rendered (due to virtualization, scrolling, or collapsed state) must be found.
All matches are highlighted in the visible viewport; the active match receives a distinct secondary highlight.
Enter / Shift+Enter (and up/down arrows) cycles through matches in document order; the viewport auto-scrolls to bring the active match into view.
Match counter displayed ("3 of 47"); explicit "no results" state.
Collapsed tool-use blocks are searched. When the active match lands inside a collapsed block, the block expands automatically so the match is visible (expand-on-navigate). Collapsed blocks containing non-active matches show a match-count indicator.
Search modifiers, matching VS Code conventions: case-sensitive, whole-word, regex (full ECMAScript).
During an in-progress streaming turn, search may exclude the still-streaming message until the turn completes (to avoid flicker). Search across all completed content must remain available throughout.

Out of scope

Cross-conversation search.
Searching within referenced files not inlined in the conversation.
Live-updating search results as new content streams in mid-turn.

Why this is worth doing

Standard editor affordance; its absence is a papercut on every long session.
Long agentic sessions are a key Claude Code use case and the one most degraded by the gap.
Closes a parity gap with the Claude.ai web interface, where Ctrl+F at least works on the visible DOM.

Alternative Solutions

_No response_

Priority

High - Significant impact on productivity

Feature Category

Other

Use Case Example

scrolled through ~200 messages looking for the specific text on discussion iterated on three hours earlier

Additional Context

_No response_