Why is that so?
1. There doesn't appear to be any relevancy sorting. It appears only the exact term is returned. If it’s not exact, I am not sure how to control whether or not it looks for an exact match and/or what strategy it uses to fuzzy match. Does it tokenize? Use some kind of levenstein distance algorithm?
2. The query results are hugely wasteful in terms of screen space. This means searching for a minorly common term in a large codebase is prohibitively time consuming compared to cloning + ripgrep or whatever.
3. There's no way to search file names + file content. It took me 7 years after github's creation to realize you could search for filenames if you press 't' on the repository.
4. No regex or globbing support, to my knowledge.
This is before listing all the tooling (like sourcegraph) I would hope would be built into a source code repository to assist browsing but are strangely missing--every IDE and editor out there is much faster at casually browsing code because navigation is so much cheaper and frictionless.
I mean overall it's not broken, it's just way less useful for searching a tree of code files than find/xargs/grep is, let alone ack/thesilversearcher/ripgrep. If the capabilities I'm describing are there, they're well-hidden. Github just isn't a good place to browse code.
2. You can stylize any page using something like stylebot or a homebrew browser extension.
3. Although not something that I do often, I find the filename search on google (for OSS projects) quite accurate and then the chrome extension allows you to open that file on sourcegraph.com or inject code intelligence within the github page as well.
4. Github sort of supports regex like search, you can learn more @ https://help.github.com/articles/searching-code/
this is just honest feedback, not a value judgement.
