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looks like Google ain’t going to slow down these days: Code Search - Google’s effort on indexing source-code on the web - was launched earlier today. Code Search offers developers powerful ways (read: regular expressions) to search for code-snippets in any particular language, under any specific license. a quick test-drive unveiled that Code Search suffers from similar problems like established competitors Krugle and Koders: string-based search-results often mistake underlying semantics. when searching for an id3-implementation in PHP, results often lead to external function-calls, but not the actual source implementing id3. still, indexing source-code will definitely help making open source knowledge more accessible to average developers, not able/willing to spend hours/days to dissect code. looking forward on Danny Sullivan’s commentary on Code Search…

update: here’s a collection of [queries for]code that was not really supposed to be public

the recommendable All about Linux-blog features a detailed walk through of many features introduced with the new version 7.0 of texteditor Vim (Vi-improved). highlights include spellchecking, ‘omni’-code completion for many predefined languages, tabbed user-interface and undo-branches. the latter is a life-saving time-machine: typing ‘:earlier 5m‘ rewinds the editor-buffer to its state 5 minutes ago - even if the file has been saved meanwhile. similarily, ‘:later 20s‘ fastforwards 20 seconds. Vim is available for unix, Windows and Mac OS-X.

I just discovered O’Reilly Code Search (Beta), a search engine indexing all the sample code of more than 700 books published by O’Reilly (that’s about 2.6mio lines-of-code :)). snippets are annoted and linked with similar code from other books - a great resource for those owning an O’Reilly-collection worth several metres of shelfspace.