Hacker News Reader

Any sane IDE 'find usage' is miles above your simple grep: just try that on any sypbol with a name common enough, and compare the results...

View on HN

This winds up not being a big deal if you use grep a lot because you'll tend toward greppable names.

More importantly though, in a codebase big/complicated enough to need "find references" functionality beyond what you get from grep, do you not also have comments, reflection, and all manner of other garbage that you need to search for via some mechanism anyway?

For a few languages (more on the way) you also have semgrep as a way to add something a bit more powerful than "find references" into a normal shell workflow.

I have used `grep -r` a ton on our codebase and purpose-specific tools like “find usages” are always more to the point while `grep -r` can easily be misleading.

Also you can’t just tend toward greppable names (whatever that means) if you share a codebase with developers who are on Windows and wouldn’t be able to tell grep from sudo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com