Grep across every open research tab

The job

You have 15 tabs open from a research bender — papers, docs, GitHub threads, blog posts — and you need to know which of them mention a specific term. "Did I see CRDT come up anywhere?" "Which of these has the migration command?" Cmd+F only searches the current tab.

Why this is hard without Sephir

You'd cycle through tabs one by one, Cmd+F each, lose the thread. By tab 8 you've forgotten what tab 1 said. Closing them is risky — you don't want to lose the context, you just want the index of which tab has what.

How Sephir does it

1. Have your research tabs open in the current window.
2. Open the Sephir sidepanel.
3. Ask: "Search all my open tabs for the phrase 'eventual consistency' — show me which tabs mention it and the surrounding context."

The agent calls grep_tabs once. Sephir greps every tab in parallel, groups matches by tab, and returns:

3 of 15 tabs match "eventual consistency":

▸ Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Chapter 5
  L:42  …trade-offs between strong and "eventual consistency"…
  L:118 …in an "eventual consistency" model the system…

▸ CockroachDB docs — Architecture
  L:87  …Cockroach offers stronger guarantees than "eventual consistency"…

▸ Hacker News thread — CRDTs in production
  L:14  …"eventual consistency" is the bug, not the feature…

When to reach for regex

grep_tabs takes the same regex flag as grep_page. So "find every mention of a date in YYYY-MM-DD format across all my open tabs" becomes one call:

@grep_tabs(query: "\\b\\d{4}-\\d{2}-\\d{2}\\b", regex: true)

What you can chain it with

• grep_tabs → extractPageText(tabId) — the agent finds which tab has the answer, then deep-reads just that tab.
• grep_tabs → openTab — the agent surfaces the matching tab to the front so you can pick up where it left off.
• grep_tabs with the includeIframes flag — Slack web threads, embedded docs, anything in same-origin iframes gets walked too.

What it doesn't do

Cross-origin iframes stay out of reach — that's a browser security boundary, not a Sephir limit. Tabs you haven't loaded yet (the agent sees them as about:blank) get reported as empty rather than silently retried; Sephir doesn't auto-load tabs as a side effect of a read tool.