Cigno

Privacy-oriented, local-first code search. Use it with Claude Code, Gemini, or as a standalone app! BM25F ranked symbol search across large codebases.

Supports search through codebases in C, C++, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go, Rust, and Java. Miss a language? Open an issue!

Install

npm i -g @cigno/search

CLI Usage

Once Cigno is installed, you can start to search through a codebase. Let's say for example we want to search through the Orama codebase:

Search

cigno search "radix tree" ./path/to/orama
cigno search "getUserById" ./src --limit 5
cigno search "bm25" . --boost fileName=10   # search by file name

Force codebase indexing

By default, Cigno uses lazy indexing: it'll index the codebase only when the user starts to search. On each search, Cigno will check for changes and re-index added, removed, and changed documents. You can force indexing/reindexing at any time by running:

cigno index ./path/to/orama

Clearing Cigno indexes

cigno clear

Experimental: Semantic Search

# Hybrid BM25 + vector search (auto-embeds on first use)
cigno search "function that implements radix trees" ./path/to/orama --experimental-semantic

Start the MCP server

cigno mcp

MCP Usage with Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Codex, Goose, etc.

Once Cigno is installed, you can use from any coding assistant tool:

Claude Code

claude mcp add cigno --description "Efficient, low-latency local code search" -- cigno mcp

Cursor / Claude Desktop / Gemini CLI / Other MCP clients

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cigno": {
      "command": "cigno",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

How it works

1. Crawl the directory tree (respects .gitignore, skips binaries)
2. Extract symbols from each file using tree-sitter AST parsing
3. Tokenize identifiers by splitting on camelCase, snake_case, and digit boundaries
4. Index into a segmented inverted index with delta+varint compressed posting lists
5. Search with BM25F scoring across multiple fields (name, signature, doc comment, body, file path)
6. Lazy Reindexing scan for changes on new searches and reindex changed files only

See architecture.md for the full technical design.

License

MIT