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search-enhancement

Find any function, variable, or macro in million-line C/C++ codebases as fast as you can type. Multi-keyword search backed by Universal Ctags. Built for FreeRTOS, kernel, embedded, and legacy projects where IntelliSense is slow or unavailable.

⚡ v0.5.0: 30× faster on million-symbol indexes — 3 s → 100 ms warm cache. See CHANGELOG.

Features

Type space-separated keywords in the search box. Results are symbols whose name contains all keywords, regardless of the order you typed them. A partial match mode is also available — turn it on and any symbol whose name partially contains each keyword will surface.

Why this over Ctrl+T (Go to Symbol in Workspace)?

VS Code's built-in symbol search uses the active Language Server. For C/C++ that means clangd or cpptools needs a complete project setup (compile_commands.json, IntelliSense database). For many real-world projects — FreeRTOS / Zephyr / Linux / vendor SDKs / legacy build systems — that setup is fragile, slow, or doesn't exist.

This extension reads from a Universal Ctags index instead:

• No build-system dependency. If ctags can parse it, you can search it. No compile_commands.json, no LSP daemon, no IntelliSense database.
• Multi-keyword AND search. Type task create to find vTaskCreateStatic, xTaskCreatePinnedToCore, etc. — regardless of word order. Add underscores like port_NVIC for phrase matching.
• Built for scale. Million-symbol indexes search in ~100 ms warm cache; per-keystroke filtering does not block the UI.
• Macros, typedefs, anything ctags knows. Includes the symbols your LSP often misses.

Installation

1. Install Visual Studio Code v1.96 or newer
2. Search for search-enhancement in the Marketplace and install

Requirements

The extension reads from a Ctags-generated symbol index. Set it up before first use:

1. Open a folder as a workspace
2. Install Universal Ctags. Pre-built binaries:
   • Windows
   • Linux
   • macOS
3. From the workspace root, generate the index:

   ctags -R --languages=C,C++ --fields=+n --extras=+q -f .tags
   

   Adding the ctags directory to PATH makes this easier to re-run.

Usage

1. Press Ctrl + Shift + P and run Search Symbols by Keywords, or focus the editor and press Ctrl + Alt + F. The search panel opens in the primary side bar (you can drag its icon to the secondary side bar).
2. Type space-separated keywords in the search box.
3. Click any result to open the file at the matching line.
4. Re-run ctags whenever your code changes — line numbers depend on the index being current.

Settings

All settings live under the searchEnhancement.* namespace. Open the Settings UI (Ctrl + ,) and search for Search Enhancement, or edit settings.json directly.

Tags file paths

• When tagsFilePaths is empty:
  • If the legacy searchEnhancement.tagsFilePath (deprecated) has a custom value, it is migrated into tagsFilePaths[0] and persisted to your settings.
  • Otherwise the default ${workspaceFolder}/.tags is used at runtime without modifying any settings file.
• searchEnhancement.tagsFilePath (singular) is retained only for migration compatibility; new setups should use tagsFilePaths.

Memory / speed trade-off (precomputeSegments)

The default (true) is tuned for typical dev machines and large codebases — on a 1.65 M-symbol index it cuts each warm-cache search from ~3 s to ~100 ms. If you index a smaller project or are on a memory-constrained machine, set it to false to save the per-symbol cache (~50–100 MB per 1 M symbols). Toggling takes effect on the next search; the parsed-tags cache is cleared automatically.

Diagnosing slow searches (profileSearch)

Enable the setting, then open View → Output and pick Search Enhancement from the channel picker on the right. Each search appends a block like:

[14:32:05] Search "port" partial=false groupBy=name
  resolve paths            0.2ms
  tags cache              45.3ms  (1 files, 1 miss)
  dedupe                   0.0ms  (47288 symbols)
  filter                  18.7ms  (47288 → 137 matches)
  build results            0.4ms
  post message             0.1ms
  ---
  extension total         64.7ms
  webview render          12.5ms  (137 results)
  ---
  end-to-end total        77.2ms

The first search after VS Code starts (or after ctags re-runs) pays a one-time tags cache parse cost proportional to the index size; later searches reuse the parsed result.

Contributing

Contributions, bug reports and feature requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Developing

npm install
npm run compile

Press F5 in VS Code to launch a development host with the extension loaded.

Tests:

npm test                  # unit + integration
npm run test:unit         # unit only — runs in plain Node, no VS Code needed
npm run test:integration  # e2e against a real VS Code instance

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.

Acknowledgements

Icon adapted from SVG Repo.