grep.app
Dev tools
code search
SHOW HN2020
How HN took it
27 positive, 23 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 6 critical, out of 57 comments about the project. Thread score +0.37.
Idea: 12 for, 0 againstExecution: 0 for, 6 againstDesign: 4 for, 0 againstPerformance: 3 for, 0 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Fast and responsive search
From 3 comments
This is one of the fastest, most responsive searches i've ever used. Great work!
OutsmartDan on HNHow is it that fast?
KhoomeiK on HNthank you so much for doing this! i hope it continues to open more doors of opportunities to you! primo, this is a crazy snappy proof that shows that github search can be done.…
blackandblue on HN
Clean, minimal interface
From 3 comments
Superb work. You built a better code search than Github (well with some of its features missing sure) with a lot less resources. Shows how stagnated the progress in big companies…
tekkk on HNThe interface for this is really clean and nice - did you use a theme or framework?
cddotdotslash on HNI was going to say that I didn't want javascript on this. But it's actually pretty #neat. It's all tidied up into a single app without any dependencies. This rocks and, so far,…
inetknght on HN
Fills the gap left by Google Code Search and GitHub's search
From 3 comments
I still miss Google Code Search, which was a great way to find examples of anything I wanted to learn about in programming and usually answered my questions better than anything…
dang on HNAwesome! To me it looks like the come back of "Google Code Search" which I've been missing for many years!
edwinyzh on HNYou have no idea how often I've wanted something like this for GitHub. Thanks so much!
aodj on HN
Objections
Index covers only about 500k repos and is refreshed every few days
From 2 comments
If this were to be offered by an actual company (a first party solution), there are some features that'd be expected that make the problem space a lot harder. Here's an "intro to…
thanatos_dem on HNThanks! It's built on top of Solr. It fetches the repos from GitHub - it should pick up any updates to repos within a few days. It's running on a couple servers with 20 cores…
danfox on HN
No deduplication of forked repos in results
From 2 comments
There isn't any deduplication, although that will hopefully be less of an issue at this point since there's a limited number of repositories in the index.
danfox on HNI do not have a great example to try on my phone, but are results deduplicated? That's my big peeve with GitHub search is getting 5 pages of the same forked repo.
TACIXAT on HN
Highlighting appears wrong in some results
From 1 comment
Amazing feat! Something I found when testing the regexp: the highlights seem to be off sometimes. When grepping for '<.*?@gmail.com>' (sorry, just the first thing that came to…
w-m on HN
Requests
Search file names or only additions and deletions
From 2 comments
Can I search only additions/deletions? Recently when searching GitHub I wanted to find if anyone had replaced the usage of a deprecated method with the new one, because the docs…
welder on HNThe fact that you can’t search for file names is the funniest part to me.
erikpukinskis on HN
Search within a single repo or exclude directories
From 2 comments
Amazin, why Microsoft hasn't built this for GitHub yet is beyond me. Can it grep on individual repos?
glouwbug on HNA tangent, my biggest gripe with GitHub code search (within a repo) off the top of my head is the inability to blacklist directories or only search whitelisted directories. Often…
oefrha on HN
Support backreferences
From 1 comment
Any plans to include backrefs? I'd like to see how many examples of /(\w+) && \1\./ are out there in .js/.ts compared to /(\w+)\?\./
jakear on HN
Questions
How the index is built and how often it refreshes
From 2 comments
Impressive! Really fast, full featured code search across a huge corpus. 1. How did you build the index? Did you use a GitHub dump of some sort? How often do you refresh it? 2.…
simonw on HNI would say this needs a list of indexed repos and mainly an explanation of how it exactly works to be usable (how's the index build and how often it's refreshed, what types of…
ferenczy on HN
How repos were selected from the public set
From 1 comment
How did you pick the 500k repositories to index out of the 28 million or so which are public?
lol768 on HN
Alternatives named
Sourcegraph
From 2 comments
This is really cool. What are you using it for? Usage examples, debugging, etc.? I'm the CEO at Sourcegraph (universal code search for companies to use on their internal code).…
sqs on HNThis is really cool! Awesome work. I assume you've seen https://sourcegraph.com/ as well? This to me seems much clearer and a bit more intuitive (though I've only spent a little…
patrickdevivo on HN
Debian Code Search
From 1 comment
I wonder how this compares to Debian Code Search (https://codesearch.debian.net/about) and Russ Cox’s code search tools (https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html). Obviously…
fanf2 on HN
Hound
From 1 comment
to grep specific repos locally, I use a tool called Hound, https://github.com/hound-search/hound developed by a couple of engineers at Etsy while I was there, but never released…
hoorayimhelping on HN
GitHub code search
From 1 comment
github's code search is notoriously bad, feels like a huge missed opportunity. Nice to see you guys reaching out to other people working in this area.
latenightcoding on HN