A brief history of code search at GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: A brief history of code search at GitHub

#21

Post by yellow_lead » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 8:57 PM UTC

mrslave wrote: post #20

prepend wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. GitHub search sucks for authoritative, governance use cases. I got burned a few times and now just pull everything down myself and search it. I think there’s code search companies but they are too expensive for me and I suppose some people really value it more highly. Comically, I need the old Google search appliance and just treat it as a web source for lots of my questions (who is using log4j, etc).

> just pull everything down myself and search it. `grep -r` or `git-all grep` or something better?

I'm not who you replied to but I use ag and it's pretty fast (faster than grep I think)

https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

Re: A brief history of code search at GitHub

#22

Post by kreetx » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 11:26 PM UTC

perk wrote: post #10

kreetx wrote: post #3

Given that this is a "history" I can't believe they don't mention grep.app. It's pretty much the way to search entire github. There probably aren't as many drill-down features as the new official way, but speed and simplicity of UI more than make up for it.

grep.app is excellent, but I don't think you can search the entire github, on the front page it says "Search across a half million git repos".

You are right. It appears there is a cut-off for inclusion (perhaps low, < 20, star count?).

Re: A brief history of code search at GitHub

#23

Post by andreareina » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 6:04 AM UTC

I don't remember what my problems are with GitHub search, only that it almost never finds what I'm looking for. I've had to resort to cloning the repo and grepping for what I need more times than I can count.