Comment by sqs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sqs | Hacker News Reader

Sourcegraph CEO here. Thanks for posting! Our new VS Code-based UI makes Sourcegraph a better way for you to read a codebase on the web with the full power and intelligence of an editor, without the hassle of cloning or configuration. It provides jump-to-def, hovers, find references, advanced search, symbol search, cross-repo references, etc., for any repo and any commit on GitHub (in Go, Java, and some other languages...more coming soon).

If you find yourself reading code on GitHub a lot, or cloning repos to open and read in your editor, you'll find Sourcegraph useful. If not, then you probably won't find it useful yet, but you might like our Chrome extension, which adds these features inline on GitHub.com (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sourcegraph-for-gi...).

We'd love feedback. Try hovering over some tokens at https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/checkup@maste..., for example. Click on the smiley in the bottom right to give feedback.

Huge thanks to the VS Code team for building an amazing and extensible open-source code editor that we can build on.

The product looks super useful, thanks for your efforts and congrats!

Your site is sorely lacking a good FAQ though. I just spent 10 minutes trying to figure out what languages you support, looking for a roadmap, trying to figure out if I can use this with any random repo on GitHub, and with which pricing plan. I only got the answers when I looked at the HN comments.

Thanks. I appreciate the feedback and completely agree. We will have a FAQ up tomorrow.

Looking at a file from one of my repos, the syntax highlighting looks wonky.

https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/eriknstr/VoxelMode-2.5D/-...

Everything on every line after '#' on line 21 is the same save for backslashes and ":3" which are blue.

We're working on improving that, and it'll work well for Python when we officially support Python. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14261611 for why, if you're curious.

Thanks.

Installed it, didn't work on https://github.com/rails/rails :(

This doesn't work either https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/rails/rails :(

Would be great if it worked, I liked the example with Go code.

Sourcegraph CEO here. We don't support Ruby yet, unfortunately. It officially works for Go and Java, and we have alpha/beta support for a couple more languages enabled too (TypeScript and JavaScript).

As you can imagine, Ruby code intelligence (type inference, etc.) is super tough, and there are maybe 5-10 people in the world who could build it right now. We'd love to find and sponsor a Ruby expert to add Ruby support to Sourcegraph. If you know of anybody, please send them my way (sqs@sourcegraph.com).

What!? There are libraries available that do static type inference on Ruby. Although the language is rather dynamic, it's in no way an intractable problem, or even one that requires a PhD in Ruby Bullshit.

Here are some libraries that could contain that one-in-a-billion knowledge:

- RDL: type annotation, but also has a static type checker. https://github.com/plum-umd/rdl#static-type-checking

- Typed: gradual typing system, with type inference https://github.com/antoniogarrote/typed.rb

- Jetbrains has something, too: https://github.com/JetBrains/ruby-type-inference

Thanks. I am on your side and have been a Ruby fan since 2005. I'm trying to throw money at building better Ruby tooling. :)

I'm familiar with those projects, but when I last tried them, they did not work well enough with some additional constraints that the nature of our product imposes (chiefly requirements for error-tolerance and cross-project resolution), and we weren't able to find people to help us. I will try them again and see if we can sponsor someone now to help integrate when with Sourcegraph, since it looks like quite a bit of progress has been made in the last few months.

@whitequark and @backus are the first that come to mind. But anybody on the ruby core team, working on parser or even rubcocop could do it.

Disclaimer: I contributed to rubocop.

> As you can imagine, Ruby code intelligence (type inference, etc.) is super tough, and there are maybe 5-10 people in the world who could build it right now.

Is Yin Wang in the list?

Do you know what happened to RubySonar?

I remember reading something about it, but now only search engines retain traces of it.

Here is his post about why he closed source the PySornar and RubySonar: http://www.yinwang.org/blog-cn/2017/04/18/close-source

Thank you.

Too bad it's in Chinese, but Google Translate got me the gist. An unfortunate story.

Not sure why he didn't settle on GPL or AGPL, though.

Is it possible to have something similar to this (http://youtubeonrepeat.com/youtube-repeat-button/) for Souregraph. I use Safari and there is no extension that allows me to instance view github repo in source graph.

Is it possible to use something to make this work?

Yep, I just uploaded it as a Gist. We'll put this up on the site soon as well.

https://gist.github.com/sqs/2a2680eff4dad159ae754756fe9326c2

Great thing, never heard about Sourcegraph before, we will surely try it. What is your business plan for it looks like may I ask?

Looks cool!

Mobile experience seems poor:

- Weird margins taking up lots of the screen

- Back button seems to be disabled (I pressed it about 200x trying to get back to HN and nothing happened)

- "view mode" would be nice: don't pop up keyboard for editing when I click on some part of a source file, but still support clicking symbols and offering options e.g. jump to definition.

Thanks for the feedback. We haven't done much mobile-specific work, and Sourcegraph does not work well on mobile. (Unlike most sites, very few people actually use Sourcegraph on mobile, but we want to make a great first impression no matter what.) We will be improving the mobile experience in a few weeks.

mobile is a huge deal for me. continuity is very important for my toolset. i also do over 50% of casual code reading mobile. mobile is also where i have the biggest issue that you solve. on desktop, i don't really need your product, on mobile i desperately do.

Got it. I'll email you. I would love to learn more about how you read code on mobile.

opening a file takes too long, likely due to minimap. I'd disable expensive eye-candies by default.

Sorry about that. We do need to improve the UI perf. Can you try it with the minimap off and let me know if it's faster? There is a "secret" way to disable the minimap: (1) hit Cmd-Shift-P or F1, (2) go to "Preferences: Open User Settings", (3) search for the "editor.minimap.enabled" setting, (4) hover over it and press the pencil and select "false". Then go back to the file and it should not display anymore in your current browser.

Ctrl-P for me on Windows just opens the print dialog.

Whoops, F1 or or Ctrl+E on Windows. Just updated the post above.

Thanks! Ctrl+E didn't work for me, but F1 does :)

Mission accomplished. Much faster without minimap enabled. :-)

Looking forward to the Python parser being GA, keep up the good work :)

Is it possible to install extensions (or perhaps support a couple of common ones)? For example, using vim keybindings is very important to my workflow.

Sourcegraph Director of Product here: We currently don't support installing extensions in our UI, but it's something we're definitely interested in. I'd love to hear more about other use cases you know you'd personally like to use?

You can however set up your own keybindings by editing the keyboard shortcut settings. Open the Quick Open (on a Mac, Command+Shift+P or F1 on a PC), and type "Open Keyboard Shortcuts". From here you can configure any mappings you'd like.

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