fall

Find ALL. Instant code search across all your repos.

fall is a lightweight CLI that gives you indexed, sub-millisecond code search across your projects. Built on zoekt (the engine behind Sourcegraph and Google's internal code search), it creates trigram indices for near-instant substring, regex, and symbol lookups.

Designed for humans and AI agents alike — plain output for machines, fall-colored output for humans.

Quick Start

# Install
go install github.com/hrishikeshs/fall@latest

# Add your repos
fall add ~/projects/my-app ~/projects/my-lib

# Search
fall "handleRequest"

That's it. Search is instant.

Install

Go (recommended):

go install github.com/hrishikeshs/fall@latest

You also need the zoekt indexer (one-time):

go install github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/cmd/zoekt-git-index@latest
go install github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/cmd/zoekt-webserver@latest  # optional, for web UI

From source:

git clone https://github.com/hrishikeshs/fall
cd fall
make install  # builds and copies to ~/bin

Usage

Search

fall "functionName"                 # search all indexed repos
fall "repo:myapp handleRequest"     # filter by repo name
fall "file:*.go func main"          # filter by file pattern
fall "lang:swift class AppDelegate" # filter by language
fall "/error.*handler/"             # regex search
fall -l "TODO"                      # list matching files only
fall --json "config"                # JSONL output (for scripts/agents)
fall --colors "auth"                # fall-colored output (for humans)

Index

fall add .                          # add current repo
fall add ~/work/api ~/work/web      # add multiple repos
fall list                           # show indexed repos

Web UI & Auto Re-indexing

fall serve starts a background daemon that runs zoekt's web UI and automatically re-indexes all tracked repos every 20 minutes. No cron jobs needed.

fall serve start                    # start daemon on :6070
fall serve status                   # check if running
fall serve stop                     # stop the daemon
fall serve restart                  # restart
open http://localhost:6070          # browse in your browser

The daemon keeps your indices fresh — just fall add your repos once and let it run. Set FALL_SERVE_LISTEN to change the port (default :6070).

Search Flags

Flag	Default	Description
--colors	off	Fall-colored ANSI highlighting
--json	off	JSONL output (one object per match)
-l	off	List matching files only
-n	50	Max file results
--context	0	Context lines around matches
--index-dir	~/.zoekt	Override index directory

Query Syntax

fall uses zoekt's query language:

Query	Matches
foo bar	Files containing both "foo" and "bar"
"exact phrase"	Literal phrase
/pattern/	Regular expression
repo:name	Filter by repository name (substring)
file:*.go	Filter by file path pattern
lang:python	Filter by programming language
sym:MyClass	Symbol search
case:yes foo	Case-sensitive search
-test	Exclude matches containing "test"
foo or bar	Match either term

For Claude Code Agents

fall's default output is optimized for AI agents — clean repo/file:line:content format with no color codes or decorations. Agents can search via the Bash tool:

# In a Claude Code session
fall "repo:myapp handleRequest"
fall --json "error" | head -5    # structured output for parsing
fall -l "migrations"              # find relevant files

How It Works

1. fall add runs zoekt-git-index to build trigram indices from your git repos
2. Indices are stored in ~/.zoekt (roughly 3x the source size)
3. fall <query> memory-maps the index shards and searches in microseconds
4. No server needed for search — it reads the index files directly
5. fall serve start runs a daemon that re-indexes tracked repos every 20 minutes

License

MIT