Hound vs Semantic Designs Source Code Search Engine

Hound is a free source code search engine that indexes repositories and offers a web interface and a minimal API. Its Go backend maintains a current index for each repository, while its static React frontend provides the web UI. Search uses regular-expression matching with a trigram index. Hound supports Git, Mercurial, SVN, Bazaar, and local repositories; private repositories can be indexed from local directories or reached through file or SSH-style URLs. By default, it checks configured repository URLs for updates every 30 seconds, with an interval that can be changed per repository. It can be built from source or run from the project's Docker image, and the web UI defaults to localhost:6080. Plugins are available for Sublime Text, Vim, Emacs, and Visual Studio Code. Hound is tested on macOS and CentOS and is expected to work on Unix-like systems, but Windows is not supported. It does not support TLS itself; the README suggests running it behind Apache or nginx. Hound uses the MIT license, and the latest listed release is v0.7.1, published May 3, 2023.

Semantic Designs Source Code Search Engine searches and inspects indexed code using language structure, so queries can target constructs and complex statements as well as text patterns. It supports regular expressions and numeric values or ranges, and searches can disregard whitespace, line breaks, and comments. The maker says it can search millions of lines across tens of thousands of source files. Results include surrounding code and highlighted matches; users can open source text or launch an editor on the matching file. The engine also calculates Cyclomatic and Halstead complexity metrics and counts source, code, comment, and blank lines. Listed scanners include ABAP, C, C++, COBOL, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, SQL dialects, and XML, with beta scanners and custom options. Files are collected, scanned, and indexed on a recurring schedule. Results can be produced in XML for other graphical interfaces. The free evaluation covers 10,000 lines and requires registration; its license ends 90 days after download. Pricing for a production license is available on request.