Glossary

Words the wiki and the code use, in one place.

Term	Means
Working tree	The files as they are on disk now, including uncommitted edits. Queries without a history operator search it
History	The commits on each repo's checked-out branch: its own (first-parent) line, plus the commits merges brought in from other branches when index.mergedBranches is on. A renamed file is followed under each name it had. author:, message: and type:commit, type:added or type:removed search it
Revision	A tag, branch, commit or time that at: reads the files at
Operator	A name:value part of a query, such as file:*.py. Each has a full name; file:, author:, symbol:, language: and message: also have a short one (f:, a:, sym:, lang:, msg:)
Global operator	One that applies to the whole query: type:, case:, word:, count:, order:, at:
Chip	One piece of the query as the daemon read it, shown under the box
Diagnostic	An error or warning about the query, with a code from the [[Error index
Fix-it	A suggested edit that resolves a diagnostic; ⌘. applies the first
Facet	A count of results by repo, language, owner, folder, author or month, which narrows the results when clicked
Pin, watch	A query kept at the top of the empty box, and a pinned history query that reports new matching commits
Daemon	The Go process that parses, plans, searches and indexes. See Daemon
Extension host	The VS Code side: commands, settings, editors, and running the daemon. See Extension Host
Webview	The search panel, help and welcome pages. A pure view. See Webview
Plan	What the planner turns a parsed query into, for exactly one engine
Engine	trigram (working tree) or history (commits): runs a plan and returns results
Shard, segment	One piece of the working-tree index, and one piece of the history index. See Indexing
Overlay shard	A small shard holding files saved since the last build, masking their old copies
Published snapshot	A complete set of shards and segments that engines read; the indexer swaps in a new one in one step
ref	An opaque handle to a result that the host and webview pass back unchanged
seq	The keystroke number every message carries, so the webview drops stale responses
Screen id	The name tests use for a mock, as in @covers screen:file-names-only. See Screens
@covers	A tag on a test naming the spec items it proves; scripts/specCoverage.mjs lists the untested ones
Oracle	A trusted tool a test compares results with: ripgrep for files, git log -G for history

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