[phil294]

I've been working on an extension https://github.com/phil294/search-plus-plus-vscode-extension for instant search results in gigantic repos like this one because it's a recurring pattern that bothers me. And eventually I'd like it to use its index to provide full go-to, autocomplete etc. on a pure plain text basis, because why not? I don't get the obsession with full-fledged language integration when plain text-based search results can get you all the way 9 out of 10 times, whereas a typical language plugin will constantly suffer from brokenness, performance problems and general annoyance, unless maybe you're working in pure JS/TS. And while LSP is great, you still have to fight this battle separately for every language you use. And regular "search" features are dreadful too.

It's one of these things that Jetbrains products are vastly superior in. It's fast, always works, falls back to text matching and also natively allows multiple languages per source file.

[progmetaldev]

Sounds really interesting, and useful for most developers. I think the issue is probably more what people have read about edge cases, than what it's actually like to use an extension like you are building. People tend to worry that they will hit the edge case and not realize it, so completely avoid anything that might give them faster results in the name of 100% accuracy that they will probably never hit. In a typed language, I would think that it would be extremely rare to search and make the type of changes that would be missed in that edge case, and the code still compiles without issue. Maybe I just haven't worked on large enough codebases, or ones that are full of "magic" where such a thing would create such an issue.

Regardless, I think it's impressive that you've taken on this task and are sharing it with the VSCode community, and appreciate you sharing.

[fpoling]

For Visual Studio on Windows Google provides a search extension that indexes Chromium locally and gives instant results for search. I was always puzzled why such functionality is not available in most IDE by default.

[mordnis]

Is it something similar to ctags? https://github.com/universal-ctags/ctags