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