Support for search engines

[Febbe]

We want to extend clangd-vscode with an AST search engine besides regex and plain text search, unfortunately it looks like, that VSCode does not support to extend the global and lokal search.
It would be very useful, if one could just add a search engine. Currently we have to add a new separate view, but that is unintentional.

Optionally it would be good to also support a pop-up dialog, with the ability to modify specific search options and a larger search field with semantic linting.

[andreamah]

We currently have proposed APIs that cover custom search engines.

See the following:
#59921
#73524

[vs-code-engineering]

Thanks for creating this issue! We figured it's covering the same as another one we already have. Thus, we closed this one as a duplicate. You can search for similar existing issues. See also our issue reporting guidelines.

Happy Coding!

[Febbe]

@caleb-allen Great question!

For the most part, this API is meant to be consumed to simply search for 'text' as-is. For example, if you create a custom filesystem, this API helps with actually understanding what it takes to get search results from your project. This being said, it was not necessarily created to facilitate a special or 'intelligent' search that requires custom options. The reason why the options have things like isRegex is because the UI (aka the search view on the sidebar) will have a button for that, which will drive what info we send to the API. If we introduced more/alternative options, this would preferably match changes in the UI. We want to keep the options simple, as that is what the user expects out of the search view (for now). Also, we only allow one provider per file scheme, so regular text would lose the traditional ripgrep text results if you overwrote our default provider for text with your own.

Can you reopen this, or explain how your extension will cover this issue?

The thing is, that we don't want to change anything with the current ways of searching.
We want to add a new search type "ast_search", which expects a string of the clang-ast-matcher-dsl. So we definitely need to somehow change the mode to something else than text or regex.
We also would like to change some options, e.g. the Traverse Mode.

A future extension would also be, to provide a rich semantic checking UI, where only valid matchers can be concatenated.