Enhanced context-aware @ Referencing in Goose: Local Files, Sessions, and Beyond + codebase Indexing in Goose

[Abhijay007]

Hi, I have a feature request, but I thought of posting it here for discussion before opening an issue.

In Goose, when I use @ for referencing a file, it currently only picks from the root directory (eg : c/users/...) and not from the folder I’m currently in. I think it would be great if we could reference specific files within the active folder for better prompting.

Also, I believe we could extend referencing beyond just files, such as referencing previous sessions/chats, maybe recipes and extensions (not sure about this one) , etc, like direly calling them with @, wanted files/folders, web search results, etc.—similar to how other IDEs and tools like Zed and Cursor handle it. This could make the workflow much more powerful.

One more thing I’m not completely sure about: does Goose currently index the existing codebase, or does it search through files during execution each time? If indexing were added, it might give better control and performance when working with code bases.

[taniashiba]

This sounds interesting. Would you mind including examples from tools like Zed and Cursor here for reference?

As for if goose currently indexes the existing codebase or search through files during execution each time, I'll let the dev team answer! @DOsinga @alexhancock @michaelneale @zanesq @katzdave @jamadeo @amed-xyz @angelahning (personal note: totally need a GitHub role to tag you in discussions like this <3 )

[Abhijay007]

yea sure :

So this is how we have it currently on goose (can only reference the user root directory, not the files of the folder we are currently in) :

And this is how we have it on the cursor :

As you can see on the cursor, we have references to multiple things, even past sessions/chats and more

[Abhijay007]

This PR is nice as this is something I am also referring to, like instead of having a individual button for all the things like files, recipes, extensions, etc, we can directly refer to them using @ only, like in this case we are calling recipes:

#4281