For almost a year and a half, users have been waiting for the news that GitHub announced yesterday: a handy feature for finding and viewing code is finally generally available.

Development of a code search feature on GitHub began in December 2021 when the feature was available in preview to a limited audience. There was even a waiting list. It’s been a while but all users can finally look up and view code.

Why

Writing your own code is only a small part of the job description for most developers. Reading and understanding code takes up a much larger chunk of their time.

Of course, it is important that those who work with a specific code can understand and fully understand it. The ultimate goal is more usability and therefore more productivity.

Digital Trinity

That’s why GitHub spent about a year and a half working on a thorough search and view feature on its platform to make life easier for developers. To achieve this, three major improvements have been made.

First of all, the user interface has been completely customized. Not only are users now presented with suggestions, but GitHub also provides ready-made codes based on what the user is looking for. In addition, the search results are also arranged more logically.

Then there’s the search engine itself. According to GitHub, it was built from the ground up and is twice as fast as the previous search. The possibilities are much more extensive; The system supports searching for partial characters, expressions and even symbols. Also, the machine understands the code itself better, so relevant results are ranked higher.

Finally, there is a view function. It now seamlessly integrates code search, browsing and navigation. A side panel gives you the necessary references, roughly equivalent to what you can do in Visual Studio.

Possibilities

Of course, all of this has a lot of potential. Fixing a bug, for example, is much faster with the new search function; In case of a problem, you can immediately search all codes of a specific company or organization. The system also helps you to quickly find specific configurations or detect vulnerabilities much faster.

Overall, the goal of GitHub is to help users find specific information faster and see it in context immediately.

Curious about the technology used behind this massive upgrade? GitHub has a separate blog about it.