GitHub Code Search is Useful
Searching through code is something most developers do every
day. Using grep
to find occurrences of a string is a lot more
efficient than scrolling through every file in your project line by
line. Most modern editors have some kind of ‘find in files’
functionality to do a regex search across your project.
Recently I have been getting a lot of utility out of GitHub’s search feature. Searching all of GitHub is like doing ‘find in files’ on more than 215 million public repositories. It can be a tremendous resource as long as you approach with a healthy amount of caution. There is no quality enforcement of open source code uploaded to the internet.
Here are a couple of things I have searched for recently:
-
use-package {package-name}
to see how other people have setup a specific package in their .emacs.d. The results helped me debug a tricky configuration problem and provided a lot of inspiration. -
RequestFactory lanaguage:Python
to see how a part of the Django testing API is used in the wild.
If you end up using GitHub search often you can add it as a custom search engine in your browser with this URL:
https://github.com/search?q=%s&type=code