Hacker News Reader

Comment by perryizgr8 | Hacker News Reader

> what real value this is adding in it's current incarnation?

Ctrl+Shift+F works. I've forgotten how many repos I clone off github just to be able to search all through the code.

> Ctrl+Shift+F works

It's not working for me (it's also the first thing I wanted). It only seems to search through files that are already open in an editor tab. E.g. in the vscode repo linked from the README search for "nodeModulesPath" and no results, but open bootstrap-node.js and it's there on line 22.

Github allows you to search through repositories as long as they're not forks.

How does that work? I've never been able to find this option. Also, this tool's search is broken. It searches only the currently open file.

GitHub search is notoriously poor, though—it can only match whole words (e.g. the query "FooBar" does not match the text "FooBarBaz"), and it doesn't support regexes.

And way worse it doesn't even keep word order and similar.

So searching for `fn foobar` will return any file containing the words `fn` and `foobar` not caring about you looking for `fn foobar`.

Then if you find what you want opening the preview doesn't jump to the right line in the file so I have to search again using "find in page".

If anyone is looking for actually useful cross-repo search: https://grep.app/

This is great, thank you.

In addition to the flaws mentioned by the other commenters (whole word only, no regexes), Github will only search the master branch of a repo, which makes it useless for my two most common tasks "where did this code used to be used" and "does this unmerged PR manage to remove all of the references to this code in its refactor (incl. in comments/etc)"

EDIT: Unfortunately, it seems like search doesn't work at all on this site, which is a shame. (at least, when I tried to do it on https://github1s.com/rails/rails it failed)

And as long as you’re not trying to do a case-sensitive search.

It does have search, but I'd be willing to wager that the normal workflow when using that is "try searching for something, look at the results page, swear, clone, ..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com