GitHub announced improvements to its code searching feature to help developers find the content they need.
GitHub Code Search
The team says developers can try it out at https://cs.github.com once the technology preview has been enabled for your account. The search index covers more than five million of the most popular public repositories and you can search private repositories you have access to.
Some of the new features:
- Easily find what you’re looking for among the top results, with smart ranking and an index that is optimized for code.
- Search for an exact string, with support for substring matches and special characters, or use regular expressions (enclosed in / separators).
- Scope your searches with org: or repo: qualifiers, with auto-completion suggestions in the search box.
- Refine your results using filters like language:, path:, extension:, and Boolean operators (OR, NOT). Search for definitions of a symbol with symbol:.
- Get your bearings quickly with additional features, like a directory tree view, symbol information for the active scope, jump-to-definition, select-to-search, and more
The search syntax documentation is available here and the FAQs are here. You can press ? on any page to see the available keyboard shortcuts.