Microsoft GitHub announced on its blog that it will greatly improve the code search feature and has launched a technology preview version. GitHub has created a separate interface for code search. The index covers more than 5 million of the most popular public repositories, and users can also search their own private repositories.
The search function has the following features:
- With smart rankings and code-optimized indexes, it’s easy to find what you’re looking for in the best results.
- Search for exact strings, support substring matching and special characters, or use regular expressions (contained in the/delimiter).
- Use org: or repo: qualifiers to determine the scope of the search and provide auto-completion suggestions in the search box.
- Use filters such as language: path: extension: and Boolean operators (OR, NOT) to optimize the results, and use “symbol:” to search for symbol definitions.
- Use additional functions to quickly understand the location, such as directory tree view, symbol information of the active range, jump to definition, select search, etc.
GitHub will increase its index until it covers every repository that users can access on GitHub, and will experiment with scoring and ranking.