Hacker News Reader

Comment by Falell | Hacker News Reader

> Search for an exact string, with support for substring matches and special characters, or use regular expressions (enclosed in / separators).

Finally!

Search-for-literal is so important when you have technical users working on non-prose text.

They say this is going in a dedicated search page 'to start with', if "<literally any text>" doesn't work in the top bar eventually this is still going to be miserable.

View on HN

I'm from the team that developed this at GitHub - if you are in the technology preview, then you can jump into cs.github.com from searches done at the top bar.

Thank you

I use Github's UI for exploring and searching codebases more often than my own environment, since I do a lot of curious browsing.

No offense, but the search is so bad for anything worse than a single word, that I've developed a sort of intuition for how to phrase things -- and then still spend a lot of time crawling pages of results haha.

This was sorely needed

Couldn't agree more - that's why we built it! Please give the new search a shot, I think you'll like it :D

how to get access to the new search :)

Hi Abdallah. If you haven't signed up yet, you can do so here: https://github.com/features/code-search/signup. People on the waitlist are getting access as quickly as the team can support it.

What's your take on developing a new code search instead of partnering with an existing global code graph like Sourcegraph? What are the advantages of GitHub Code Search over Sourcegraph?

+1 pretty much what was on my mind, seeing this. does this compete or complement sourcegraph?

Well, in the past I've tried Sourcegraph several times, but it never give me experiences that match the was-dead-many-years-ago Google Code Search. I wish the new github code search does that.

Hey Edwin, if you're open to providing feedback, I'd love to understand which types of searches worked well for you in Google Code Search but not in Sourcegraph. We've invested a lot of thought into our query syntax, supporting literal matches, regex, and the Comby pattern matching syntax with a rich set of keywords and filters—but we know the syntax isn't always intuitive for every user. We're always trying to improve the experience for all our users (I'm the CTO at Sourcegraph), so if you have any recollections you're open to sharing, would love to hear them!

For me for one thing, although I do use Sourcegraph for searching public code (thanks for creating and maintaining it!), I find the website too slow and heavy-feeling. Not in a way that makes it impossible to use, for sure, but somehow just slow enough to clearly not feel "snappy" but rather "bulky" and lagging. In particular this (and maybe also some other UX choices, like not 100% always fully supporting right-clicking and "open in new tab"? Not sure now if that's indeed so, but kinda feeling I'm always afraid to do this - or maybe because I fear slowing down my browser?) makes me do less searching with it than I'd need/want to, and makes me hesitate internally every single time I'm thinking whether to open a (new) tab with Sourcegraph. Although I know the results will be very good; but I know also I'll feel tired by the lagginess.

is there a way to change the default search context(which is global)

Not right now, but that's some common feedback that we hope to soon address.

It's not quite what you're asking, but it you want to limit your searches to a particular repo, you can just type that into the URL bar (and then bookmark that): https://cs.github.com/$OWNER/$REPO, just like how the repo's primary site on GitHub is https://github.com/$OWNER/$REPO

I use github search a lot and this would be an insane productivity boost. I signed up for the waitlist. can you please give me a nudge in the queue? This is my profile https://github.com/abdallahmansour6

Reply on news.ycombinator.com