zoekt

Fast trigram based code search

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15Distinct people

15Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

2.1KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Fast trigram based code search

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 3:30:57 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year15 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2023-07-04 14:32:57 UTC to 2026-04-29 13:56:19 UTC.

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	5	0	5
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	5	1	4
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	1	1
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	0	3

What Hacker News says

5 sources

hanwenn·Nov 21, 2023

Russ Cox' trigram approach uses document IDs for the posting list, which makes the index much smaller, but gives less precise (ie. slower) matching. This is mentioned in the design doc at https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/blob/main/doc/design.md....

In Code Search at Google: Han-Wen and Zoekt

tromp·Nov 21, 2023

Wondering how this tool got named after the Dutch verb for seek, I found this quote on its github page [1]. > "Zoekt, en gij zult spinazie eten" - Jan Eertink > ("seek, and ye shall eat spinach" - My primary school teacher) [1] https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt

In Code Search at Google: Han-Wen and Zoekt

ilaksh·Aug 27, 2023

https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt seems to be doing a fair amount of heavy lifting for Cody.

In Cody – The AI that knows your entire codebase

smarx007·Jul 4, 2023

What is a good open-source system for code search if I want to plug 100 or so git repos into it and have it available over the web? GH search is not desirable because it would search too broadly and would not cover repos on Gitlab etc. I looked at the Debian code search [1] in the past, but for some reason thought it required a bit too much effort and didn't complete my investigation of it. Though [2] looks pretty approachable. Sourcegraph mentioned Zoekt [3], but I am not sure how usable it is. If it was pretty good, why did Sourcegraph OSS exist? Finally, from all the discussion how Sourcegraph OSS was very behind in the past few years, I guess there is no serious plan to fork it? Edit: GCS release [4] seems to have been open-sourced without a frontend. Edit2: Livegrep [5] and Opengrok [6] were recommended higher in the thread. Quite ex

Read the rest

cited to try them out but if someone has working Docker Compose configs, I would be very thankful for the head start. Edit3: there is also Eureka [7]. Seems less powerful but easier to deploy. [1]: https://github.com/Debian/dcs [2]: https://github.com/Debian/dcs/blob/main/howto/building.md [3]: https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt [4]: https://github.com/google/codesearch [5]: https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep [6]: https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/ [7]: https://github.com/Rajeev-K/eureka

In Sourcegraph is no longer open source

rattray·Jul 4, 2023

Of note, they mention (ordering/emphasis mine): > We remain committed to Zoekt, the open source code search engine, and will continue to upstream changes to it. https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt > The source code will remain publicly available. > Individual devs will still be able to use Sourcegraph for free on public code at sourcegraph.com and within our self-hosted free tier on private code. > Very few individual devs or companies used the limited variant of code search that was open source. The vast majority (99.9%+) used the enterprise product. Maintaining two variants going forward was a big burden on our engineering team that had very little benefit for users.

In Sourcegraph is no longer open source