Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by beliu 1654 days ago
Hey Edwin, if you're open to providing feedback, I'd love to understand which types of searches worked well for you in Google Code Search but not in Sourcegraph. We've invested a lot of thought into our query syntax, supporting literal matches, regex, and the Comby pattern matching syntax with a rich set of keywords and filters—but we know the syntax isn't always intuitive for every user. We're always trying to improve the experience for all our users (I'm the CTO at Sourcegraph), so if you have any recollections you're open to sharing, would love to hear them!
2 comments

For me for one thing, although I do use Sourcegraph for searching public code (thanks for creating and maintaining it!), I find the website too slow and heavy-feeling. Not in a way that makes it impossible to use, for sure, but somehow just slow enough to clearly not feel "snappy" but rather "bulky" and lagging. In particular this (and maybe also some other UX choices, like not 100% always fully supporting right-clicking and "open in new tab"? Not sure now if that's indeed so, but kinda feeling I'm always afraid to do this - or maybe because I fear slowing down my browser?) makes me do less searching with it than I'd need/want to, and makes me hesitate internally every single time I'm thinking whether to open a (new) tab with Sourcegraph. Although I know the results will be very good; but I know also I'll feel tired by the lagginess.
is there a way to change the default search context(which is global)
It's not quite what you're asking, but it you want to limit your searches to a particular repo, you can just type that into the URL bar (and then bookmark that): https://cs.github.com/$OWNER/$REPO, just like how the repo's primary site on GitHub is https://github.com/$OWNER/$REPO
Not right now, but that's some common feedback that we hope to soon address.