Building a search tool for devs, share your thoughts!

Right now, it's just scatter-gather. Try to find results from different sources concurrently, combine them (no order guarantee) into a list and return. I have some ideas in mind about how to do scoring (reduce search scope by predefined keywords, use some NLP, etc.). It is still work in progress though.

depends on the quality of the results

Yep, agreed. I am experimenting with some full text search engine. And GPT3 as well.

Instead of having to switch to a browser

Actually, it won't be browser. That's the main idea. It will be a raycast/spotlight type of app that you can access with a hotkey.

Here's how the user flow will be:

1. You are writing some code or running some commands in terminal
2. You have a doubt (e.g., what flags should i use to extract a tar file)
3. You hit cmd+shift+a and a small spotlight-like window pops up (even in fullscreen mode)
4. You type extract tar file or $ tar ($ is for getting command help), etc.
5. Best result is shown. If applicable, a press-enter-to-copy also becomes available (for commands, code snippets, etc.)
6. You press enter -> the best result is copied to clipboard and the popup goes away.
7. The focus is given back to whatever your last app was (i.e., the terminal/editor you were in)
8. You continue by pasting

Note: In case you don't find appropriate response in the app, there would also be a shortcut to launch the browser directly with your query so that you can fallback to normal google search approach.

(I am still experimenting on whether to have raycast extension as the main product or a standalone raycast-like app)

Yea, my landing page definitely needs a lot of work.

Thanks for trying it out and Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks 🙂. right now it's just markdown rendered as html with default config though. Needs lot more work.

They might. But at-least for now, these are focusing mainly on code generation. I am focusing on searching - for documentation on different commands, existing answers from stack-overflow, etc. I am also experimenting with GPT3 integration to generate answers where possible. For example: user might query howto: extract tar file (howto: is a special prefix for guiding search) and i can use GPT3 to generate the command and directly show it as a result.

And my other plans include (but not limited to): to try to make it configurable to index internal data sources (within a team or company), sharable snippets, etc.

Yess! It's very similar to howdoi.

I have multiple sources in their original or sometimes customised formats: tldr, learn-x-in-y, wikipedia, etc. to name a few.

Glad you like it and thanks for joining the waiting list. I will keep you updated (no spamming, i promise) 🙂

Thanks for responding! We can chat over email 🙂