GitHub is rolling out a technology preview for substantial improvements to searching code on GitHub. It’s an early look at efforts and they want to get feedback as they iterate on helping people explore and discover code—all while saving time. You can sign up for their waitlist now, and give them feedback!
Once the technology preview is enabled for your account, you can try it out at https://cs.github.com. Initially, we’re creating a separate interface for the new code search as we build it out, but once we’re happy with the feedback and are ready for wider adoption, we will integrate it into the main github.com experience.
At the moment, the search index covers more than five million of the most popular public repositories; in addition, you can search private repositories you have access to. Here are some things to look out for:
- 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:orrepo: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 withsymbol:.- 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 syntax is documented here, and you can press
?on any page to view available keyboard shortcuts. You can also check out the FAQs.
See the video below and more on the GitHub Blog.