Code search has undergone a complete overhaul that has been in development for years, according to GitHub, which has just made it generally available.
The modifications contain a huge amount of new functionality that is much more cognizant of context. The business claims that their updated code search is “about twice as quick” as the previous version and that it “understands code, putting the most relevant results first.”
In addition, the search and code view user interfaces have been updated. The updated search interface provides completions and suggestions in addition to categorizing and intelligently formatting the results.
While looking up and going to references in the code view, it’s simple to see references in a side panel, which is similar to how you could do it in Visual Studio. Furthermore, symbol search, regular expressions, and substring queries are supported.
In December 2021, a waitlist-required technological preview of this update became available. Those who chose to participate and were given access to the new search spent a lot of time utilizing it apart from the previous code search.
Check out the February 2023 post on the GitHub engineering blog for a much more in-depth explanation of how it works, the technologies that were employed to create it, and other information.
The modifications are intended to increase software engineers’ efficiency; for instance, the improved search might be far more effective at locating certain vulnerabilities in a vast codebase.
As previously mentioned, the modification has been planned for some time, but GitHub is portraying it as a component of a bigger effort to give the platform greater intelligence. The enrichment and development of the AI coding tool Copilot using generative AI is the other standout bullet point in that endeavor.
Listing image by GitHub