Sift
Find every line that contains all your search words — in any order.
VS Code's built-in search finds one pattern at a time. Sift lets you type multiple words and instantly surfaces every line across your workspace that contains all of them, regardless of order.
Why Sift?
Type return together language and Sift returns every line containing all three words — like this:
VS Code search can't do this natively without writing a lookahead regex like (?=.*return)(?=.*together)(?=.*language).* by hand. Sift makes it a simple space-separated query.
Features
Quick Search — floating, non-intrusive
Open a floating search palette without leaving your editor or file tree.
- Command Palette →
Sift: Quick Search
- Default shortcut:
Cmd+Shift+F7 (Mac) / Ctrl+Shift+F7 (Windows/Linux)
- Results appear live as you type. Press Enter to jump, Escape to dismiss.
- Your file and Explorer stay fully visible throughout.
The Sift panel in the activity bar gives you a persistent, browsable results tree.
- Results grouped by file, showing relative paths
- Each matching line is clickable — jumps to the exact location
- Files glob filter to scope results (e.g.
*.ts or src/**)
- Badge on the panel shows total match count
In-memory index — instant results
On startup, Sift indexes your workspace into memory. Once built, every search runs entirely in RAM — no file I/O per keystroke, no cap on results.
- Automatically excludes
node_modules, .git, dist, out, build, and minified files
- File watcher keeps the index current as you edit
- Falls back to VS Code's ripgrep engine while the index is building
Per-word color highlights
When you open a matched file, each word in your query is highlighted in its own distinct color so you can immediately see what matched where.
Usage
Multi-word search
Just type words separated by spaces. Order doesn't matter — Sift finds lines containing all of them.
| Query |
Finds lines containing |
return together language |
all three words, any order |
user token refresh |
all three words |
TODO fixme |
both TODO and fixme |
File filter
Use the Files input in the sidebar to scope results to specific file types or directories:
| Filter |
Effect |
*.ts |
TypeScript files only |
src/** |
Files under src/ only |
*.test.ts, *.spec.ts |
Test files only |
Keyboard shortcuts
| Action |
Mac |
Windows / Linux |
| Quick Search |
Cmd+Shift+F7 |
Ctrl+Shift+F7 |
| Focus sidebar |
Command Palette → Sift: Focus Search |
same |
You can rebind sift.quickSearch to any key via Keyboard Shortcuts (Cmd+K Cmd+S).
Settings
| Setting |
Default |
Description |
sift.maxResults |
200000 |
Max results from the fallback search engine (only applies before the index finishes building on first load). |
Tips
- Code exploration: search
return together language to find every line in your codebase that has all three terms
- Log analysis: search
warn database timeout to find all lines mentioning all three terms
- Quick Pick + sidebar together: use Quick Pick for one-off jumps, keep the sidebar open for browsing a full result set
- Move the Sift panel to VS Code's secondary sidebar (right-click the activity bar icon → Move to Secondary Side Bar) so Explorer stays on the left while Sift shows on the right
