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Commands

Every marq command supports --help. The full auto-generated tree is at CLI reference; this section groups commands by what they do and links to a deeper page for the ones worth explaining beyond their --help text.

Read-only

Safe to run freely — nothing here mutates the index.

Command Purpose
search Full-text keyword search (BM25, no LLM)
vsearch Vector similarity search (no reranking)
query / deep-search Hybrid: expansion + RRF fusion + reranking (recommended)
get Get a document by path or #docid
multi-get Get multiple documents by glob or comma-separated list
ls List collections, or files in a collection
status Show index status and collections
doctor Diagnose Postgres/pgvector/migration/LLM-router health
bench Run search-quality benchmarks against a fixture file

Search & query covers search/vsearch/query in depth. → Bench & doctor covers bench and doctor.

Mutating

Index-changing — collection and context management.

Command Purpose
collection add/list/show/remove/rename/update-cmd/include/exclude Manage indexed collections
context add/list/rm/check Manage per-path and global search context
update Re-index all collections
embed Generate vector embeddings for pending documents
cleanup Remove orphaned content/embeddings/inactive documents

Collections & context covers all of these.

Agent integration

Command Purpose
mcp / mcp --http / mcp stop Start (or stop) the MCP server
skill show / skill install Show or install the bundled agent skill
skills list / get / path Discover bundled skills generically

MCP server covers mcp. → Agent skills covers skill/skills.

Output formats

search, vsearch, query, and multi-get all accept --format:

cli (default, human-readable) · json · csv · md · xml · files · toon (a compact LLM-oriented tabular encoding)

See Search & query › Output formats for an example of each.