The new code search engine has been remodeled to be two times faster than the old one and has more capabilities such as supporting substring queries, regular expressions, and symbol search.

Code Search understands a user’s code and brings relevant results at high speeds by searching across multiple repositories. Users can search using regular expressions, boolean operations, keyboard shortcuts, and more.

“Imagine that a user complains that they received an error message from your service saying ‘query is not satisfiable.’ You’re not sure which system produced this error message, or which repository the code is in,” ​​Colin Merkel, software engineer at GitHub, wrote in a blog post. 

“Without code search, you might have to clone a bunch of repositories and grep through them, or ask a knowledgeable coworker. But with code search, you can instantly search across all of an organization’s code at once.” 

As an example, if a company uses Kubernetes and their infrastructure team reports a shortage of memory in their cluster, one approach could be to search for YAML configuration files containing the term “memory” across the team’s code. The search results, which can be saved with a query such as “saved:blackbird lang:yaml memory,” would reveal the Kubernetes configuration files for the team’s services and their allocated memory. The search results could then be shared with the infrastructure team to initiate a discussion on the memory allocation for those services.

For teams using React, the prop dangerouslySetInnerHTML is a well-known feature that enables the direct injection of HTML into an element using a string. However, it can pose a security risk if the string being injected is untrusted. One way to identify potential vulnerabilities is by searching for the usage of this prop across GitHub’s codebase using a query such as “repo:github/github dangerouslySetInnerHTML.” The search results could reveal any occurrences of the prop, including some linter rules that forbid its use. 

GitHub also redesigned its code view to integrate search, browsing, and code navigation. The company stated that this launch is just the beginning and it is infusing intelligence into every aspect of software development moving forward. 

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“With AI available at every step, we can fundamentally redefine developer productivity. We are reducing boilerplate and manual tasks and making complex work easier across the developer lifecycle. By doing so, we’re enabling every developer to focus all their creativity on the big picture: building the innovation of tomorrow and accelerating human progress, today,” Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, wrote in a blog post. 

The new chat capabilities are intended to provide a “ChatGPT-like experience” in the editor. It natively integrates into VS Code and Visual Studio and can recognize code that has been typed and what error messages are shown, enabling it to provide analysis on what the code blocks are intended to do, generate unit tests, and provide bug fixes. 

There is also a voice component to this that will enable developers to give prompts by speaking. 

Another part of Copilot X is that it will be able to generate descriptions of tags and descriptions for pull requests. The company is also working on a feature where it will warn developers if a pull request doesn’t have sufficient testing and then suggest potential tests. 

Copilot is also being integrated into documentation, with a chat interface that will allow developers to ask questions about the languages, frameworks, and technologies that their code is using. It has already created this functionality for React, Azure Docs, and MDN documentation, and plans to also bring this to internal documentation as well.  

“From reading docs to writing code to submitting pull requests and beyond, we’re working to personalize GitHub Copilot for every team, project, and repository it’s used in, creating a radically improved software development lifecycle,” Dohmke wrote.

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‘git jump’ now works with ‘diff’ in which the quickfix list is populated with the beginning of each changed hunk in a repository to allow users to quickly scan changes in their editor before committing them. The tool also works with ‘git jump merge’ to open Vim to the list of merge conflicts. 

In Git 2.40, git cat-file -s and ‘–batch-check’ will report the object size as if it had been written using replacement identities when invoked with’ –use-mailmap’ whereas it was ignored in previous versions. 

Past versions also had limitations on ‘check-attr’ because it required an index, but now it supports a new ‘–source=’ to scan for ‘.gitattributes’.

There have also been a few highlights from GitHub’s long-running effort to rewrite old parts of Git from their original Perl or Shell implementations into more modern C equivalents. 

Users can now consolidate Git commands into a single process, enabling them to run much more quickly on platforms with a high process start-up cost, such as Windows.

Also, ‘git bisect’ is now fully implemented in C as a native builtin. On the other hand, Git 2.40 retired the legacy implementation of ‘git add –interactive’, which also began as a Shell script and was re-introduced as a native builtin back in version 2.26 to support both the new and old implementation behind an experimental ‘add.interactive.useBuiltin configuration’.

Lastly, developers will have access to under-the-hood improvements to Git’s CI infrastructure that result in CI runs that can be completed more quickly and with fewer resources. 

Additional details on all of the improvements in Git 2.40 are available here. 

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GitHub Copilot will soon bring its AI-pair programmer to businesses with added admin controls and the ability to manage licenses. Copilot uses OpenAI Codex to suggest code and functions in real time right in the editor. 

“Hey GitHub” also makes Copilot accessible to developers who can’t use a keyboard everyday through voice-based interaction, but the GitHub Next team behind the functionality hopes to expand its capabilities through further research and testing.

Also, Codespaces is now generally available for all GitHub users and everyone will receive up to 60 hours of Codespaces for free every month.

The new code search and code view offers a new search engine that can access the world’s code easily, a new search interface, powerful queries with suggestions completions, and a redesigned code view that integrates search browsing and code navigation.

Additional details on the new products are available here. 

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With this users gain the ability to incorporate build information into deployment pipelines with GitHub’s introduction of a new push-build-information-action. This lets users provide commit, build, and issue tracking information to Octopus.

According to the company, GitHub Actions for Octopus Deploy v2 also makes it easier for users to reference release tags within workflows. Any alterations made to actions will now automatically update release tags and will be incorporated into workflows.

“GitHub Actions is a powerful tool that automates software development workflows, like CI/CD,” said Paul Stovell, founder and CEO of Octopus. “We are evolving the deployment capabilities of GitHub by providing actions that integrate directly with Octopus Deploy. Octopus Deploy is the ‘peanut butter’ to GitHub Actions’ ‘jelly’; it uses GitHub Actions for building and testing code and uses Octopus Deploy for deployments. With our integration in GitHub Actions, customers may achieve reliable, repeatable, traceable deployments across clouds and on-premises infrastructures.”

Additionally, this update offers improved visibility, making GitHub Actions for Octopus Deploy easier to use for deployment automations. 

It has reduced the number of requirements as well as added output to the execution logs. It also added support for environment variables for sensitive values.

Lastly, users can now see job summaries generated through GitHub-flavored Markdown when creating a release or pushing a package to Octopus. The company stated that this makes it simpler to aggregate and group these actions.

For more information, click here.

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According to GitHub, mathematical expressions have become essential to information sharing amongst engineers, scientists, data scientists, and mathematicians. 

Support for displaying math expressions has been highly requested from the community for over eight years. Now, users can use the “$” and “$$” delimiters natively in Markdown on GitHub in order to insert math expressions in TeX and LaTeX style syntax. The content is then rendered using the MathJax library. 

MathJax is an open-source, JavaScript-based display engine that supports a wide range of LaTex macros, as well as several accessibility extensions. To learn more about MathJax see the documentation and the MathJax Accessibility Extensions Documentation. 

There are several different ways that users can include math expressions, such as inline with text by delimiting the expression with a dollar symbol or as a block by starting a new line and delimiting the expression with two dollar symbols.

Additionally, in order to display dollar signs as a character within the same line as a mathematical expression, the user has to escape the non-delimiter dollar sign in order to allow the line to render correctly.

Within a math expression, this can be done by adding a “\” symbol before the dollar sign and outside the expression by adding span tags around the explicit dollar sign. 

To learn more, see here.

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GitHub initially released Codespaces to address cloud-native applications that are housed in a single repository: the most common type of project on GitHub. 

For those that are developing a feature that spans many different types of services, GitHub added the ability for users to configure which permissions their codespace should have on creation. This is so that users will no longer have to set up personal access tokens inside of their codespace to clone or create pull requests for other types of repositories.

Developers can specify repository permissions in their ‘devcontainer.json’ under the ‘customizations.codespaces.repositories’ so that developers will be prompted for the right set of permissions while working on the project.

“We also want to ensure that we continue to provide the ease of environment creations through simple one-click experiences that don’t require you to spend undue time understanding various configuration options,” GitHub wrote in a blog post. “However, if you need more flexibility, we’ve created a new advanced create flow for Codespaces that allows you to select various options, such as branch, region, machine type, and dev container configuration while creating your codespace.”

With the new features, repository administrators can create multiple devcontainers, each with permission sets, setup scripts, and a codespace configuration specific for certain teams. Developers can benefit by being able to select the ideal devcontainer, machine type, and region during codespace creation with the advanced creation flow as needed.

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Dependabot alerts use GitHub’s precise code navigation engine to determine if a repository directly calls a vulnerable function. 

The new feature marks a shift in how GitHub curates information on vulnerable packages from the Advisory Database to curating information on affected functions for each source library. 

GitHub performs static analysis with functions in order to generate an affected call graph for a repository, which surfaces on a Dependabot alert. 

The implementation is powered by stack graphs, which powers Precise Code Navigation and provides a no-configuration experience that works on any advisories with annotated vulnerable functions, according to GitHub.

GitHub announced that it has details of vulnerable functions for 79 Python advisories from the pip ecosystem and that it will continue backfilling data on vulnerable functions for Python advisories through the beta, as well as supporting any new Python advisories.

“Since our February ship of improvements to Dependabot alerts, Dependabot has helped developers resolve nearly 3 million alerts,” Erin Havens, product manager at GitHub, wrote in a blog post. “Dependabot alerts will now surface whether your code is calling vulnerable code paths, so that you can prioritize and remediate alerts more effectively.”

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GitHub Discussions will now be supported at the organization level for open-source projects, enterprises, and development teams. This change comes after discovering that scoping discussions to individual repositories became a road block for organizations with multiple repositories. 

Organization Discussions works to simplify centralizing communications across projects to gain a better understanding of what’s happening within the community, team, and company. 

Based on customer requests, the GitHub team is also bringing Polls to Discussions. Now, when creating a new discussion, users have the ability to select the Poll category to create a Poll. This feature allows customers to add up to eight polling options for teams to respond to. 

These Polls are visible to anybody if it is on a public repository, but only those logged in have the ability to vote.

Also, integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams have been introduced for GitHub Discussions. Once a user configures the application and subscribes to Discussions, they get a notification whenever a Discussion is created or answered. 

Lastly, GitHub Discussions users gain access to an easier Q&A option. Now, there is a preview of the response that the original poster marked as an answer at the top of the thread as well as a link to the full, more detailed answer. 

GitHub Discussions is available on GitHub Free, GitHub Team, and GitHub Enterprise accounts for both public and private repositories. For more information, see here.

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The solution first launched as a technical preview last June, and according to GitHub, Visual Studio 2022 was the most requested IDE by the community. 

The solution makes suggestions to developers as they type, suggesting the code it thinks they might want. It can suggest whole lines or entire functions based on the context from the code being written. 

RELATED CONTENT: GitHub Copilot sparks debates around open-source licenses

Developers will need to be in the technical preview in order to get access to the extension. If not already in the technical preview, they can request to be added and will gain access as more capacity is added to the service. 

If already a part of the technical preview, developers can search for the GitHub Copilot extension and install it. 

More information on how to get started with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code 2022 is available here. 

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