Why should we use this instead of the github search (for our private repos) ?
Personally, I find it to be absolutely horrendous. It’s so much faster to clone the repo and search it locally.
Why is that so?
1. There doesn't appear to be any relevancy sorting. It appears only the exact term is returned. If it’s not exact, I am not sure how to control whether or not it looks for an exact match and/or what strategy it uses to fuzzy match. Does it tokenize? Use some kind of levenstein distance algorithm?
2. The query results are hugely wasteful in terms of screen space. This means searching for a minorly common term in a large codebase is prohibitively time consuming compared to cloning + ripgrep or whatever.
3. There's no way to search file names + file content. It took me 7 years after github's creation to realize you could search for filenames if you press 't' on the repository.
4. No regex or globbing support, to my knowledge.
This is before listing all the tooling (like sourcegraph) I would hope would be built into a source code repository to assist browsing but are strangely missing--every IDE and editor out there is much faster at casually browsing code because navigation is so much cheaper and frictionless.
I mean overall it's not broken, it's just way less useful for searching a tree of code files than find/xargs/grep is, let alone ack/thesilversearcher/ripgrep. If the capabilities I'm describing are there, they're well-hidden. Github just isn't a good place to browse code.
2. You can stylize any page using something like stylebot or a homebrew browser extension.
3. Although not something that I do often, I find the filename search on google (for OSS projects) quite accurate and then the chrome extension allows you to open that file on sourcegraph.com or inject code intelligence within the github page as well.
4. Github sort of supports regex like search, you can learn more @ https://help.github.com/articles/searching-code/
this is just honest feedback, not a value judgement.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43891605/search-partial-...
So, you end up having to clone all repos locally and grep for the word.
Just pointing out that limitation of search in GitHub, not saying that this other tool is actually reliable to do this kind of things (I haven't used it before)
To compare GitHub to Sourcegraph search, here is that same query on Sourcegraph.com (which is Sourcegraph Server running for all open-source code on GitHub):
https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=repo:Kurento/+DISABLE_LIBRA...
It works as expected (and as the SO poster wanted)! It shows desired results that GitHub search does not.
Regexps are also supported...give it a try!
does it parse the code and store the AST, or is it just plain text ?
It does have code intelligence (parsing, semantic references and go-to-def, etc.) but that search is just a text search.
- Regular expression searches
- Exact searches (no ignoring punctuation, for example)
- Searches on any commit or branch, not just recently indexed master
- Diff searches (see https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-sourcegraph-s...)
- Overall faster, more powerful searches and filtering capabilities
- Code intelligence (go-to-definition, find-references, hovers, etc.)
Not everyone needs these things. But users who do need them say that they save a lot of time and make them more productive.
At Google, for example, they have a similarly advanced internal code search system that developers love (see https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... and https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LQxLk4E3lrb3fIsVKlANu_pU... for research/numbers).
If your needs are met by GitHub's search, then I would still suggest using the Sourcegraph Chrome extension (also available for Firefox), which adds code intelligence to code you view on GitHub: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sourcegraph-for-gi....
> You may not release the results of any performance or functional evaluation of any of the Software to any third party without prior written approval of Sourcegraph for each such release.
For example: https://cs.bazel.build/search?q=r%3Atorvalds+meltdown&num=50 searches the Linux kernel for "meltdown"
But you can try/use it for free on open-source projects using our Chrome extension (to get it on code you view on GitHub) at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sourcegraph-for-gi... or on our public site directly at https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/gorilla/websocket/-/blob/... (for example).
It may be useful to consider a baseline two-language deal, as Javascript + one server side language covers a huge amount of use cases.
That said, you cover 2 out of 3 of the following scenarios pretty well with the existing model, I just happen to fall into the third, which is probably the smallest sector for you guys anyway:
1 - Small startups, probably standardized on one or two languages, 8-10 people 2 - Larger orgs (200+) where the cost is negligible compared to revenue. 3 - Medium-sized, microservice/squad based orgs, with heterogenous language support but focused within teams.