You, as a programmer, must search for the many files that make up a system if you want to understand how it works. Larger software systems with hundreds of files in several programming languages might be difficult to discover particular code.
Using code search tools or search engines is a great help in this situation. Searching across several software projects is made simpler for engineers by these tools. Since they can create more code faster, the development process is also sped up.
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The Silver Searcher
The Silver Searcher by Geoff.Greer.fm is a great tool for searching code. It was first presented as a clone of another utility, Ack, which now includes more capabilities. Faster than Ack’s tool by a factor of five to ten times. Over the last several years, they’ve made many updates to enhance its speed, usability, functionality, reliability, and other elements.
Sourcegraph
More than one million open-source repositories may be searched using Sourcegraph. You may turn on or off case sensitivity, regular expressions, and structure search from the search area. It’s also possible to duplicate the whole query. Using the tools, you can search your repository without regex or escaping and evaluate commits faster than the grep git process. Additionally, you have the option of filtering code based on several factors, such as language.
Searchcode
Searchcode can help you find 75 billion lines of code. There’s a search box where you may type in a specific character and click enter to find these lines of code among the 40+ million projects accessible.
If you’re looking for real-world examples of how to use a certain function, library, or API, you may use Searchcode to discover them. Additional options include filtering by repository, source language or other sources like BitBucket and Android.
Krugle
In Krugle’s search box, enter a search term to begin searching for your code. The code pattern you input will display you the results from hundreds of open source projects. You can also explore projects and do an advanced search using the tool.
In addition, Krugle enables programmers to identify source code with the data necessary to analyse the code, change it, and deploy it. It is, in reality, a full software development solution for companies with teams of one to tens of thousands of people.
Google Code Search
Google’s Code Search is a public code search engine designed to make code exploration easier for developers without requiring them to download the source code. In open-source projects such as Android and Chromium, it can be used.
Filters, syntactic options, keyboard shortcuts, and operators are all supported by this application. It has a basic search function at the top of its user interface so that you may search for code snippets or particular files.
RE2 regular expressions are used by default in Code Search. It’s possible to avoid regex entirely by wrapping your search terms in double quotation marks, such as (“). Cross-references for certain repositories are also available, and symbols are linked to their meanings when cross-references are enabled.