The Indexing Engine is Windsurf’s codebase awareness service that powers: Compared to regular context-aware Autocomplete and Chat, the Indexing Engine is able to retrieve context from across the entire codebase, not just files that you have recently interacted with. This significantly improves the quality of autocomplete and chat responses.
Local Indexing is on by default for all Plugin users, and always on for Windsurf Users.

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How It Works

The Indexing Engine works in part by generating embeddings for your codebase that capture the underlying meaning. These embeddings can queried using both Natural Language and related code snippets. Windsurf Indexing does send snippets of code to a remote server to generate embeddings. However, no code or embeddings are stored remotely — all your data is stored on your own device.

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How to Toggle Indexing Engine

To toggle Indexing Engine in VS Code, go to your “Settings (UI)” page, and search for “Windsurf Search”. You should see an option to enable search, and set the Max Workspace Size.Then restart your IDE and the change should be reflected.
You can see if your workspace is indexed by checking the “Context” pane in the “Chat” panel. If there is a green dot next to your workspace, then it is indexed and searchable.

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WindsurfIgnore

By default, Windsurf Indexing will ignore:
  • Paths specified in gitignore
  • Files in node_modules
  • Hidden pathnames (starting with ”.”)
When a file is ignored, it will not be indexed, and also does not count against the Indexing Max Workspace Size file counts. If you want to further configure files that Windsurf Indexing ignores, you can add a .codeiumignore file to your repo root, with the same syntax as .gitignore

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Global .codeiumignore

For enterprise customers managing multiple repositories, you can enforce ignore rules across all repositories by placing a global .codeiumignore file in the ~/.codeium/ folder. This global configuration will apply to all Windsurf workspaces on your system. The global .codeiumignore file uses the same syntax as .gitignore and works in addition to any repository-specific .codeiumignore files.

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System Requirements

When first enabled, Windsurf will consume a fraction of CPU while it indexes the workspace. Depending on your workspace size, this should take 5-10 minutes, and only needs to happen once per workspace. CPU usage will return to normal automatically. Windsurf Indexing also requires RAM (~300MB for a 5000-file workspace). The “Max Workspace Size (File Count)” setting determines the largest workspace for which Windsurf Indexing will try to index a particular workspace / module. If your workspace does not appear to be indexed, please try adjusting this number higher. For users with ~10GB of RAM, we recommend setting this no higher than 10,000 files.