travsr ask

Search the indexed graph for symbols matching a query string. Results are ranked and packed into a token budget for use in prompts or scripts.

Synopsis

travsr ask "<query>" [flags]

Flags

Flag	Default	Description
--budget <n>	4096	Token budget; stops adding results once the cumulative token count would exceed this value
--json	(none)	Output raw JSON instead of a table
--repo <path>	cwd	Repository root

How it works

travsr ask runs a three-stage retrieval pipeline:

1. FTS5 full-text search: matches the query against symbol names, signatures, and docstrings using SQLite FTS5 trigram tokenisation.
2. PPR (Personalized PageRank): re-ranks candidates by their graph centrality relative to the query symbols.
3. Knapsack packing: selects the highest-scoring results that fit within --budget tokens.

This is the same pipeline that backs the get_context MCP tool.

Output format

Results are printed as an ASCII table:

+----------+-----------------------------------+--------------------------------+-------+
| Kind     | Signature                         | Path                           | Score |
+----------+-----------------------------------+--------------------------------+-------+
| class    | PaymentService                    | src/services/PaymentService.ts | 0.94  |
| method   | charge(amount: number): Receipt   | src/services/PaymentService.ts | 0.91  |
| function | processPayment(req, res): void    | src/routes/payment.ts          | 0.83  |
| method   | refund(id: string): Receipt       | src/services/PaymentService.ts | 0.79  |
+----------+-----------------------------------+--------------------------------+-------+
4 nodes · ~847 tokens

The footer shows the number of nodes returned and the approximate token count.

Examples

# Symbol search
travsr ask "PaymentService"

# Broader concept search, synonym expansion applies
travsr ask "billing"

# Narrow to a specific file area
travsr ask "auth middleware"

# Increase budget for larger context
travsr ask "UserRepository" --budget 8192

Synonym expansion

If you have synonyms configured (e.g. payment → billing, invoice), travsr ask "billing" will also match nodes tagged with payment and invoice. See travsr synonym.

VS Code

The Ask Symbol panel (Cmd+Shift+A) runs the same query interactively in the sidebar.