Github beefs up code search capabilities with new features

San Francisco, California based code hosting platform for version control and collaboration, GitHub, has beefed up its code search capabilities with substantial improvements. The company launched a preview of the features to come on Wednesday.   

GitHub’s search index currently covers about five million popular public repositories, along with search capabilities for private repositories. Some of the new search capabilities include smart rankings and results that are optimised for code.   

Search will also soon include the ability to look for an exact string, with support for substring matches and special characters, the company said. In computer programming, strings can be defined as a traditional sequence of characters which can either be a variable or a literal constant.   

“For code search, our vision is to help every developer search, discover, navigate, and understand code quickly and intuitively,” said Pavel Avgustinov Senior Director of Product engineering at GitHub, in a blog post.   

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GitHub also said that the searchers will have multiple filters such as language, path, extensions and Boolean operations, along with searching for definitions for specific symbols.   

The auto-completion feature will also help developers get better suggestions, while searches can be scoped better with qualifiers such as ‘org:’ and ‘repo:’ among others.   

Other features include search results in directory tree view, symbol information, jump-to-definition, select-to-search and more.   

GitHub earlier this year had launched GitHub Copilot in technical preview, which utilises AI to help coders code better. The company also launched Codespaces in August, which is a cloud-based development environment.    

GitHub said that it will provide deep-dive into the engineering behind code search and more open source projects in the near future. Developers will be able to register for the preview of the code search by joining the GitHub Code Search Waitlist.