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Finding Content

Scope and Context

How pinakea decides what your actions apply to (all, filtered, selection, KB)

When you use pinakea, different parts of the app respond to what you’re doing: chat answers questions based on a certain set of items, the summary pane shows detail for what you’ve selected, and search narrows what’s visible. This page explains how pinakea decides what applies where — so the behavior always makes sense.

Two kinds of context

pinakea tracks two things separately:

Conversation scope is what Chat uses to find answers. This could be all your items, a filtered search result, a specific selection, or the pinakea knowledge base.

Inspection selection is what the Summary and Original panes show. When you click an item in the timeline, the sidebar shows its summary and original content.

These two often align — but they don’t have to. You can click around in the timeline to inspect different items while chat keeps working with a broader (or different) set of content.

How pinakea decides what to show you

When multiple things could define your scope, pinakea follows a clear priority:

  1. Knowledge Base mode — if you’ve opened Chat with Knowledge Base, everything uses pinakea’s own help docs until you exit.
  2. Active chat retrieval — while you’re in a chat conversation and clicking citations to explore source items, chat keeps its scope locked so your browsing doesn’t change the conversation context.
  3. Committed search — if you’ve searched and committed the results, chat and summaries work within those filtered items. This stays active even if you click on individual items for inspection.
  4. Current selection — if you’ve selected one or more items in the timeline, chat focuses on those.
  5. Library — when nothing else applies, chat has access to everything in your current Set.

The key insight: a committed search “wins” over a selection. So you can search for a topic, then click individual items to read them, and chat still covers the full search results — not just the one item you clicked on.

Common situations

Nothing selected, no search active. Chat with Library covers all items in your Set. The summary and original panes are empty until you click something.

You selected a single item. Chat focuses on that item and includes the complete source text when it fits DeepSeek’s direct-context budget — great for asking detailed questions about one document. The summary and original panes show that item’s content.

You selected multiple items. Chat covers all selected items. The summary and original panes are disabled (they work with one item at a time), but chat handles multiple items naturally.

You selected a day, time range, or tag. Chat builds direct context from that bounded selection. If the combined source text fits, it is included directly; if it is too large, pinakea condenses it with metadata, summaries, and relevant excerpts.

You committed a search. Chat and the summary pane use only the filtered results, regardless of which search scope you used (Titles, Summary, Content, or Semantic). You can still click individual items to inspect them in the sidebar, but chat stays on the filtered set until you clear the search. If your filtered results include starred items, the summary pane shows those first in a dedicated section, followed by the regular overview.

You’re browsing citations during a chat. When you click a citation in a chat response, the timeline jumps to that item and the sidebar shows its summary and original content. But the chat scope stays locked — you’re exploring the evidence without losing the conversation context. This keeps things stable: you can click through several citations, read the originals, and come back to chat without it changing underneath you.

You loaded a previous chat from History. pinakea restores the saved messages and, when the session has stored source items, filters the timeline to those items again. This is explicit History behavior; passive app launch can still reopen a normal Chat with Library session in library scope.

Chat with Knowledge Base. When you open Chat with Knowledge Base, you’re asking about pinakea itself — not your content. Exiting Knowledge Base mode brings you back to your normal scope.

Reading the scope at a glance

The chat header always tells you what scope is active — look for “Chatting with: Library”, “Chatting with: Search results”, or the specific item name. The toolbar button also switches between Library and Filtered so you can tell at a glance whether a search is narrowing your context.