8 ms·

Things I would build if I worked at GitHub

233 points by holic 11y ago

tacone 11y ago
To be frank, it is pretty much ok for the +1 to be annoying: it's often what they are meant to. Thus, if a vote button were to be implemented, it would not be used all the time.
nickbauman 11y ago
Absolutely fix the pull request interface. It currently reads like a ransom note. Go over to bitbucket.org and copy theirs. It's 100x better.
- anton_gogolev 11y ago
  What don't you like in current PRs?
  - nickbauman 11y ago
    Generally the UI is just poorly designed and unfocused. One specific thing: You can't mark them as approved in any way and doing something like +1 in a comment somewhere doesn't count.
OedipusRex 11y ago
I hope all of his post on this blog are like this one (https://kevin.is/committed-to-github/ https://kevin.is/committed-to-github/, Kevin is committed to GitHub)
Linell 11y ago
I'd also love for commit messages to be parsed as markdown. I can't really think of a downside to it.
- geofft 11y ago
  Ugh, that should be an opt-in thing. I've had trouble with Trac parsing commit messages as trac-wiki syntax, which is generally a great idea. The problem is occasionally you'll use markup characters in a semantically meaningful way, e.g. "Switch from `foo` to $(foo)", and rendering the markup will make the commit message confusing to read. I'd be much more enthusiastic if there was some magical way for the local git command line to also support Markdown rendering/preview.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    You could set something like markdownpad as your git editor.
geofft 11y ago
It seems like some of these (perhaps all of them other than fixing the "+1" problem) can be done via API clients instead of via GitHub itself implementing it. A third-party website can do wiki searches. A separate service can send you email notifications, and you can turn off built-in emails. Even the +1 thing might be solvable with a bot that edits each bug report to add a clickable +1 badge (a la the CI build-passing badges) at the top; all you need is to give the bot ownership of your repository. The badge can display the current +n count, and the service can give you a sorted list of open issues by +n. For bonus points, have the bot also harvest and remove comments that consist of just "+1" or ":+1". This is GitHub after all; why don't we build stuff ourselves instead of waiting for a centralized closed-source company to decide they care about our features?
- allendoerfer 11y ago
  >This is GitHub after all; why don't we build stuff ourselves instead of waiting for a centralized closed-source company to decide they care about our features? Why would I build something for a centralized closed-source company?
  - geofft 11y ago
    Because then the only thing you're relying on the centralized closed-source company for is actual git hosting. This is a boring problem that dozens of other services solve well, and thousands of other services (like S3) solve poorly in a pinch. If you can migrate the interesting part of GitHub -- issue tracking, PRs, wikis, etc. -- to another provider, and GitHub just holds your data, then you're no longer locked in. If you don't build it and you wait for the centralized closed-source company to, then you're putting your project even more in their hands.
    - allendoerfer 11y ago
      Migrating issue tracking and other stuff out of Github seems like a good idea if you want to reduce dependency, building a bot on top of Github issues - what you implied in your parent post - not so much.
artur_roszczyk 11y ago
+1 I would also implement a button for reverting pull requests already merged in master. Reverting merges may be not trivial for less experienced users
web007 11y ago
I reported this a while back, so it's in their backlog somewhere but obviously not super-important: I'd like to see an option to turn off fork notifications for org projects without turning off all org notifications. As-is, I get an email for every dev forking every project, sometimes more than once due to lack of git knowledge.
lhnz 11y ago
Personally, I'd like a nice GUI to pick and squash commits with new commit messages against them on creating a pull request. I don't enjoy using the CLI for this, and it would be nice to thread thoughts on the solution into the commits themselves rather than explaining solely in the PR description.
- dlib 11y ago
  I second this, also I'd like to see an overview of the (files with) merge conflicts if any instead of a message saying the PR can't be merged. Fixing the merge conflicts might be another thing in the web interface would be cool but I guess I'll stick to the CLI for this.
jasode 11y ago
Those are interesting suggestions, but my guess is that they are probably focusing on features to make github more enterprise friendly. If a16z invests $100 million in github, it doesn't seem like streamlining emails will have the ROI that investors expect. Maybe github is focusing on creating a full software development lifecycle management (ALM) in the cloud. (Like Microsoft Team Foundation Server and JIRA.) A dashboard for sprints, defect fixes, issues tracking, etc. That's the type of "enterprisey" thing that attracts more business subscriptions. They use the storage of sourcecode repositories to open doors to other sw development related business. These are just my guesses. I haven't seen any explicit roadmap from github.
- tracker1 11y ago
  I'm actually hoping they bring something into GH for business/enterprise that is better, or as good as TFS or JIRA... I like TFS, but non-VS projects are a pain... and JIRA is just well, not pleasant at all. Once they have some sort of better issue tracking system, then migration tooling will become another big issue in that space.. getting from SVN+JIRA or TFS itself would be really useful to a lot of orgs, willing to pay. Something between TFS and Axosoft's OnTime would be pretty nice as an addition to GH. Another area with a lot of potential would be a CI/CD toolset that uses your own cloud.. EX: you use api keys for Azure, GCE, AWS, DO etc, and then you can setup testing/limits and Github could just manage the provisioning of the test servers, and ease setup/deployment of test/stage/prod classes of servers for multiple languages. GH wouldn't have to manage a huge infrastructure itself, just build/sell tooling that extends it's current product line.
sandGorgon 11y ago
I would build a Slack alternative + Jira alternative that is deeply integrated into Github. QED.
tsuresh 11y ago
GitHub wiki is a repo and can be cloned locally. Searching through a local files is trivial.
- mellett68 11y ago
  I'd argue that's still a bit of a pain compared to a fulltext search in the browser. I can already search the rest of the repo and issues that way, so why not the wiki? Good tip though.
jarjoura 11y ago
My biggest pet-peeve about GitHub is its issue tracker system. It's great for one-off issues or tracking a pull-request, but beyond that its design is super unwieldy. Such a missed opportunity to crush JIRA, et. al.
- anton_gogolev 11y ago
  What do you miss the most or find cumbersome or unusable?
  - bqe 11y ago
    - Issues that span multiple projects - Searching all issues for an organization - Voting on issues (not just :+1:) - Public issues for private repos - Attaching files (repros, necessary files, etc.) - Dependencies/links - Priority (you can label priority but not sort by it) - Metrics of any kind
    - ma138 11y ago
      Check out ZenHub - https://www.zenhub.io/ https://www.zenhub.io/ It adds these features to improve the GitHub Issue tracker directly into GitHub.com, allowing you to: - Display issues on a task board by priority and progress - Attach any file type to an issue - Add estimates and view burndown charts / metrics attached to them - +1 issues to avoid excess comments - Improved search functionality - Link repos together to view issues that span multiple projects Without having to context switch out to a separate issue tracker or UI ---- Disclosure - I work at ZenHub, and use it with GitHub all day :D
brobdingnagian 11y ago
The ability to search your own gists!
kevinSuttle 11y ago
I started this as well: https://github.com/kevinSuttle/github/issues https://github.com/kevinSuttle/github/issues (not the same Kevin as link author)
danielsamuels 11y ago
I've gotta say, I strongly disagree with this: > GitHub already has a great code search At some point in the last year or so Github rolled out a new search engine which drastically reduced it's usefulness. Any moderately complex search query now has all of the modifiers and key bits stripped out making your search results unnecessarily cluttered and somewhat useless. I consider it to be one of the worst parts of the site these days.
- davidcelis 11y ago
  I really wish there were some way to run code searches against branches/commits that aren't HEAD. If there is, it's not obvious.
- jberryman 11y ago
  I regret every single time I try to use github search, even for the most basic "where is X defined" type queries.
- anshukla 11y ago
  Depending on what you're trying to search for, maybe something intelligent like Sourcegraph would work?
- justinhj 11y ago
  Git grep is really fantastic, if github search came close I'd be delighted
  - p8952 11y ago
    Could you please elaborate on what parts of git-grep you find most useful?
- johnbellone 11y ago
  GitHub has horrible search.
felixgallo 11y ago
These are great, but they're bugfixes. You'd finish them in the first few months. Then what are you going to do? Stare at an aquarium all day? Here's what I would build if I worked at github: * Github CI - simple CI for every language, integrating with: * Github Artifacts - repository for versioned deployable build packages (binaries, tar.gz files, ios builds, android builds...), integrating with: * Github Deploy - deploy tooling for deploying runnable artifacts or artifact combinations to either your own infrastructure, or to aws/azure/google, or: * Github Cloud - instances/containers as a service and the 'fork' button would be a pulldown that would include the options 'fork', 'fork and test', 'fork, test and deploy'. Now that's a nice little 3-4 year career.
- holic 11y ago
  Maybe a more apt title would be "Things I would fix if I worked at GitHub". :)
- jxm262 11y ago
  A github CI would be awesome! I imagine it would get very costly for them though. I love Travis-CI and the easy integration, but it's too expensive for my non-open source projects.
  - sytse 11y ago
    GitHub CI might happen sooner rather than later https://twitter.com/j2h/status/627114183621013504 https://twitter.com/j2h/status/627114183621013504 Anyway, if you want it today consider using our GitLab CI https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/ it is free if you bring your own runner.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  I can't tell if there was a satirical subtext about aggressive expansion in this post, what with "Now that's a nice little 3-4 year career."
- panic 11y ago
  You'd finish them in the first few months. I bet you could work on small polish issues like this for a lifetime and never finish. There's always something to improve.
thinkbohemian 11y ago
Better filters for emails. Would love to subscribe to only new issues on a repo or random issues on a repo. Basically http://codetriage.com http://codetriage.com
- tracker1 11y ago
  For that matter, on the issues page, and labels/markers for new issues vs. old ones with a "me too" comment. or for that matter issues that you've commented on. I follow a couple dozen projects and after a couple days, my GH notifications page gets insane. Making issues more usable would be a big win imho. Also, a "priority" follows would be nice too.. so your org/project issues can be viewed separately from your follows. Seeing adoption of something closer to ontime/tfs/jira would be nice too.
qntmfred 11y ago
https://github.com/isaacs/github https://github.com/isaacs/github has a ton of these missing features
Buetol 11y ago
Just see the top requested features: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Acomments-desc https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aop... * Change the target branch of a pull request pull-requests * Delete / remove an issue completely. * Gist comments and mentions don't trigger notifications * Add HTTPS support to Github Pages * Add ability to follow organizations like a user * Insert automatically generated table of contents TOC on rendered markdown files like README.md. * pre { tab-size: 4 }
- beltex 11y ago
  > Add HTTPS support to Github Pages This is technically already available, though not officially documented anywhere [1]. Example [2] [1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/156#issuecomment-37747957 https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/156#issuecomment-377... [2] https://beltex.github.io https://beltex.github.io
  - holic 11y ago
    While that's true, I think the discussion in that issue has gone more towards HTTPS support for custom domains.
    - tracker1 11y ago
      You could always use CloudFlare directly for that... I would presume that their underlying connection to Github is very close and reliable in terms of risk for MITM.
      - kirushik 11y ago
        Even better, you could CNAME your custom domain into the *.github.io domain, which is protected by a wildcard https. So you traffic between CloudFlare and GitHub will also be secured.
        holic 11y ago
kzhahou 11y ago
They'll need another $100 million to get these done! (Yes, by which I am saying their website has not improved much given their massive funding)
- bqe 11y ago
  It's actually very surprising how little visible improvement GitHub has had in the past few years. What are they working on?
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Marketing by the looks of it. I have to say I like what Gitlab is doing these days much more than GitHub.
    - sytse 11y ago
      Glad to hear that, our company and community tries to keep shipping!
  - omni 11y ago
    Projects like Atom which have basically nothing to do with their core service?
  - rkuykendall-com 11y ago
    https://github.com/blog https://github.com/blog Lots of things. Github ships features like crazy. Lots of the features I use every single day were only released in the last few months. On a scale of years, all of their desktop clients, which are a huge experience improvement for new users.
sytse 11y ago
Great list, we're working on making something that makes +1's less noisey. If you want the possibility to contribute to the tools you use daily consider using our GitLab. It is open source and more than 800 people have contributed already.
- qmr 11y ago
  Why is there no IPv6 support?
  - sytse 11y ago
    I think GitLab supports it https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/412 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/412 but we have not had the time to set it up for GitLab.com yet. We'll be moving our infrastructure to Azure soon so it is not a priority for us now.
jpdlla 11y ago
* Search code in a branch other than master. * Advanced code search inside a repo(match searches with symbols, etc.)
epberry 11y ago
Wiki search is #1 on my wish list for Github. I see others talking about cloning the wiki repo locally and searching it but for big projects this would be the equivalent of downloading something like the Python docs and searching them. It could be done but it would be a massive pain in the ass. I have written most of the documentation for the project I contribute to the most and I organized the wiki like a two level tree where a top level page has links to category pages and each page on the wiki is linked to from one of those category pages. Then there are links interspersed among the pages like a normal wiki. This structure works okay but I know it can be better because sometimes I cannot even find information that I produced!
- lochlan 11y ago
  If you use Chrome you have an option here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/github-wiki-search/gdifdhnjmjaidbajhapmbcbnoocoeooc?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/github-wiki-search...
  - epberry 11y ago
    Awesome, already used this twice. Thanks!
rocky1138 11y ago
Search can be easily worked around by using Google with the site: parameter, e.g., search on Google with this query: wireless site:https://github.com/esp8266/esp8266-wiki/wiki https://github.com/esp8266/esp8266-wiki/wiki
- holic 11y ago
  Great tip, but unfortunately that doesn't work for private repos.
eam 11y ago
Getting notifications/emails when a new release is released of a repo I'm watching or have starred would be awesome!
- jellekralt 11y ago
  For the time being you could use Sibbell: https://sibbell.com/ https://sibbell.com/
mpdehaan2 11y ago
This is a really good list. As for sorting things by file, here's a pretty cool project to do that using GitHub API - https://github.com/sivel/pr-triage https://github.com/sivel/pr-triage
fiatjaf 11y ago
A better way to browse forks. If today you see that a major repository has a fork with a lot of commits, you cannot know without looking through THEM ALL if they are just typo fixes or if the fork is really changing/improving things over the main repo.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  This. The amount of time I have wasted looking in forks is staggering.
  - knappe 11y ago
    100% agree. I wish there was some way to also promote a fork, other than changing the readme to point to the new fork, which also means mucking up the history of the project.
- z1mm32m4n 11y ago
  One way that has served me as being a pretty good metric of what's what when it comes to forks looking at the number of stars the parent and child repos have. If a fork has started to usurp it's parent, it generally has a fair deal of its own stars.
electic 11y ago
I would also like to see GitHub Chat. Complete Slack killer with the same heart and spirit of Atom.
foolfoolz 11y ago
git hubs worst problem: FIXED WIDTH CODE READING code is read way more often than written. and on github website all you can do is read it. why the viewports don't take up the entire screen width i will never understand.
- baddox 11y ago
  Yeah, that's a puzzling one. I've been using a browser script for a long time now to make the code view full width.
  - gknoy 11y ago
    I don't use it often, but I have a Javascript bookmark [0] that I use in Chrome when the 100-character width is excessively abused. Over time, I found I dislike using it enough that I now try to limit my lines to 100 characters in my editor, so that my github diff presentation is easier to read. I'm sure there's an easier way to do this. I'm pretty certain I cribbed the method of setting a style from a StackOverflow article or other thing found online, but that was three years ago so I do not recall where it was. (Sorry.) I think all I did was poke around the Chrome debugger until I found the styles I needed. 0: https://gist.github.com/gknoy/0cc03a6401103bf41daf https://gist.github.com/gknoy/0cc03a6401103bf41daf
- jjgreen 11y ago
  It is long lines which damage readability, and that is the fault of the gonk who wrote the code. If anything, GH's fixed-width design encourages shorter lines and so improves readability.
davidcelis 11y ago
For the "voting on issues" feature I'd really just love to see them clone Slack's recent "Emoji Reactions" feature.
fogonthedowns 11y ago
I would really like to have the ability to Edit commit messages using the web interface. I'm often stuck with a poorly crafted message and an edit function would help that.
ocdtrekkie 11y ago
I'd kill for merge conflict resolution in the web UI.
jkmcf 11y ago
Better blame history navigation, functionally the same as how Textmate does it. 1. git blame file 2. click on a hash for the change 3. show the file for that change Right now, (3) shows you the diff for the hash
andrewbinstock 11y ago
By far the biggest thing I wish github would do is change the text entry beside the file names. Right now, it shows the comment of the last push of edits to that file. That's great for members of the project. However, for non-members it would be far more useful to know what the file is. Here, enabling a one-line description would be hugely helpful. Since GH knows if you're a member of the project it can show you the right text--description or latest update. And presumably, a button would allow you to see the other text if you needed it.
- hyperion2010 11y ago
  If you don't know where to look it can take a surprisingly long time to find things like: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/HOWTO https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/.... It is obvious once you know, but unless you know are in the habit of checking all the 'likely places' such a doc would be you are going to be lost. While one could allow annotations on top of files in github it would completely fragment real and important documentation efforts and leave information scattered in 10 different locations that no one could pull back together.
TheRealWatson 11y ago
I always wished GitHub had a chat room per repo. Fully integrated with github features, like mentions, issues, pull requests. Maybe even hubot builtin.
- hyperion2010 11y ago
  gitter?
TheRealWatson 11y ago
It's very common, at least on my team, to create pull requests for the wrong target branch. I don't see why GitHub doesn't allow you to fix it before any comments are posted. This would save some useful time.
choward 11y ago
> These are great, but they're bugfixes. I agree with every you said but that first sentence. How are these bugs? They are features that never existed.
kranzky 11y ago
Things I would build: * Push conflicted branches so developers in a distributed team can work together to resolve conflicts. * A git-powered version of Rake, which runs only those tests that need to be run based on the git history since the last run. * A tool to identify what code changes caused a particular test to fail, based on the above. * Language syntax detection for smarter diffs, improving the display when blocks of code are moved around or indented/outdented. * Language linters built in, to detect when a change is introducing a syntax error. Same for coding style. I'd also move the "Close Pull Request" button a little farther away from the "Comment" button, and make it possible to add comments to a diff when you've hidden whitespace differences (with `&w=1`... I'd also make it a bit more obvious that you could do that).
- pbiggar 11y ago
  > * A git-powered version of Rake, which runs only those tests that need to be run based on the git history since the last run. I think you mean "magic". That is, this is not possible :) Not that I wouldn't like it to be.
  - kranzky 11y ago
    Well, it is kind-of possible for Ruby/Rails. I half-built such a system once. Here's what you do: * Gather coverage information when running tests or compiling assets. * Use that to generate Rakefiles for running tests / compiling assets that have dependencies on the source files they would touch. * Run the tests once, recording information about the git status of each dependency. * When the git status of a file changes (i.e. you've just fetched some changes), mark the dependency as dirty Even better, it you're gathering coverage data and know the test status for each commit, then not only can you show the commit that broke the build, you can show the particular part of the diff that broke the build. Here's a guy who was trying to do some of this: https://github.com/Genki-S/ttnt https://github.com/Genki-S/ttnt
hlfcoding 11y ago
An unordered list of missing features from me: - No ability to store the tab size setting. While appending '?ts=2' to the url is ok, it's not convenient and usable on a daily basis. The same for omitting whitespace changes in a diff / pr ('?ws=1'). - No ability to step through history on a single file while in blob view, or blame view. In blame view, the commit link goes to the commit, not the blame of the file at that commit. - Agree with OP that notifications need to be grouped / summarized better. Perhaps expandable summary items per repo per type. This is mostly useful for private, work-related repos. Pulse and notifications are basically the same thing. - Stars cannot be tagged. This makes managing hundreds of stars difficult. There's apps like Astral, but even those are lacking.
adamnemecek 11y ago
I would make the search results deduplicated. It happens to me a lot that I search for something and the first 10 pages of search results are from the same 5 projects, but from different locations within the single projects. I usually lose patience sometime around page 5.
arikrak 11y ago
I feel one could have more ambitious goals. E.g. Could Github build a powerful developers careers site based on all the data they have? Could they provide more tools to help people program? (Could they automatically create programs? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9973088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9973088)
simonw 11y ago
The biggest thing I want from GitHub is the ability to search commits. GitHub are pretty good at search (their issue search is fantastic, and their code search is decent enough) - but the data I most want to search are the commit messages in my repo. I understand this will be a huge amount of data (they must have hundreds of millions if not billions of commits by now). I'd be perfectly happy if this was only available for paid repositories. The ability to then further facet and filter searches by author, file, directory etc would be unbelievably useful.
- simonw 11y ago
  Oh, and while we're talking pony requests... I'd dearly love to be able to use gists within the scope of an organization. It would be fantastic to be able to share code snippets that were only visible to other organization members (and searchable and so on).
  - iancarroll 11y ago
    I know this isn't exactly what you want, but GitHub Enterprise comes with Gist.
andrewchambers 11y ago
One thing that has bitten me is the code review submitting each line of feedback instantly, before you have finished reviewing the whole pull request.
- piotrkaminski 11y ago
  Check out https://reviewable.io https://reviewable.io to fix this (disclosure: I built it).
bronson 11y ago
How about making pull requests less centralized? Right now, if I file a PR, only the project admins or I can modify/rebase it. I'd like to give other (non-admin) collaborators permission to work on it too. Or, maybe it could use a forking model? Let anyone fork their own PR from mine, make those forks prominently visible in my base PR, and make it easy for me to merge their edits back in.
- teddyh 11y ago
  If you want anything less centralized, then why are you using Github, a centralized interface to and storage of a previously inherently de-centralized system, git? Github is for people who accept centralization.
  - bronson 11y ago
    That's not true. Why do you think github promotes forking and pull requests? Some centralization is necessary, true, but you seem to be confusing GitHub with Google Code and SourceForge.
stevekemp 11y ago
I see people here posting issues of their own, but I'm amazed nobody has yet mentioned the lack of IPv6. I've setup a few machines with IPv6-only network connections, and it makes pulling my dotfiles from github a pain since I need an IPv4-proxy/tunnel to access github.com
- justincormack 11y ago
  Given up complaining for now. They just don't seem to get it.
pietherr 11y ago
Things @teabass would build if he quit GitHub: https://libraries.io https://libraries.io Really useful to get updates on new releases of libraries you use.
fred2133 11y ago
Github Firehose if it was me. Something to build tools on top of.
jafingi 11y ago
+1 ;-)
masklinn 11y ago
> The suggested alternative is to "Subscribe" to an issue for updates, which is what I've started doing to issues that I want to show my support for. My support, however, isn't visible to anyone else. Though following the resolution of an issue usually means I'd like for it to be resolved, the converse isn't true: I've hit thousands of issues over the years but most of the time I've been able to work around them and haven't hit it since, resolving the issue would be nice for people coming after me, but I don't really care to be spammed by its status updates. So yes, "subscribe" could count as a +1, but no "subscribe" should not be the only way to "+1" an issue.
Jemaclus 11y ago
The only thing I really, really want is paginated diffs for pull requests. C'mon. If I have 300 files, don't show me the first 15 and then say "well, this is too big, you'll just have to imagine what the rest of the diff looks like." Does Google return the first page and then say "the rest of the internet isn't available to you because we don't want to paginate things"? No, of course not. Just freaking paginate long diffs. Gah.

233 points by holic 11y ago

To be frank, it is pretty much ok for the +1 to be annoying: it's often what they are meant to. Thus, if a vote button were to be implemented, it would not be used all the time.

nickbauman 11y ago

Absolutely fix the pull request interface. It currently reads like a ransom note. Go over to bitbucket.org and copy theirs. It's 100x better.

anton_gogolev 11y ago
What don't you like in current PRs?
- nickbauman 11y ago
  Generally the UI is just poorly designed and unfocused. One specific thing: You can't mark them as approved in any way and doing something like +1 in a comment somewhere doesn't count.

OedipusRex 11y ago

I hope all of his post on this blog are like this one (https://kevin.is/committed-to-github/ https://kevin.is/committed-to-github/, Kevin is committed to GitHub)

Linell 11y ago

I'd also love for commit messages to be parsed as markdown. I can't really think of a downside to it.

geofft 11y ago
Ugh, that should be an opt-in thing. I've had trouble with Trac parsing commit messages as trac-wiki syntax, which is generally a great idea. The problem is occasionally you'll use markup characters in a semantically meaningful way, e.g. "Switch from `foo` to $(foo)", and rendering the markup will make the commit message confusing to read. I'd be much more enthusiastic if there was some magical way for the local git command line to also support Markdown rendering/preview.
- tracker1 11y ago
  You could set something like markdownpad as your git editor.

geofft 11y ago

It seems like some of these (perhaps all of them other than fixing the "+1" problem) can be done via API clients instead of via GitHub itself implementing it. A third-party website can do wiki searches. A separate service can send you email notifications, and you can turn off built-in emails. Even the +1 thing might be solvable with a bot that edits each bug report to add a clickable +1 badge (a la the CI build-passing badges) at the top; all you need is to give the bot ownership of your repository. The badge can display the current +n count, and the service can give you a sorted list of open issues by +n. For bonus points, have the bot also harvest and remove comments that consist of just "+1" or ":+1". This is GitHub after all; why don't we build stuff ourselves instead of waiting for a centralized closed-source company to decide they care about our features?

allendoerfer 11y ago
>This is GitHub after all; why don't we build stuff ourselves instead of waiting for a centralized closed-source company to decide they care about our features? Why would I build something for a centralized closed-source company?
- geofft 11y ago
  Because then the only thing you're relying on the centralized closed-source company for is actual git hosting. This is a boring problem that dozens of other services solve well, and thousands of other services (like S3) solve poorly in a pinch. If you can migrate the interesting part of GitHub -- issue tracking, PRs, wikis, etc. -- to another provider, and GitHub just holds your data, then you're no longer locked in. If you don't build it and you wait for the centralized closed-source company to, then you're putting your project even more in their hands.
  - allendoerfer 11y ago
    Migrating issue tracking and other stuff out of Github seems like a good idea if you want to reduce dependency, building a bot on top of Github issues - what you implied in your parent post - not so much.

artur_roszczyk 11y ago

+1 I would also implement a button for reverting pull requests already merged in master. Reverting merges may be not trivial for less experienced users

web007 11y ago

I reported this a while back, so it's in their backlog somewhere but obviously not super-important: I'd like to see an option to turn off fork notifications for org projects without turning off all org notifications. As-is, I get an email for every dev forking every project, sometimes more than once due to lack of git knowledge.

lhnz 11y ago

Personally, I'd like a nice GUI to pick and squash commits with new commit messages against them on creating a pull request. I don't enjoy using the CLI for this, and it would be nice to thread thoughts on the solution into the commits themselves rather than explaining solely in the PR description.

dlib 11y ago
I second this, also I'd like to see an overview of the (files with) merge conflicts if any instead of a message saying the PR can't be merged. Fixing the merge conflicts might be another thing in the web interface would be cool but I guess I'll stick to the CLI for this.

jasode 11y ago

Those are interesting suggestions, but my guess is that they are probably focusing on features to make github more enterprise friendly. If a16z invests $100 million in github, it doesn't seem like streamlining emails will have the ROI that investors expect. Maybe github is focusing on creating a full software development lifecycle management (ALM) in the cloud. (Like Microsoft Team Foundation Server and JIRA.) A dashboard for sprints, defect fixes, issues tracking, etc. That's the type of "enterprisey" thing that attracts more business subscriptions. They use the storage of sourcecode repositories to open doors to other sw development related business. These are just my guesses. I haven't seen any explicit roadmap from github.

tracker1 11y ago
I'm actually hoping they bring something into GH for business/enterprise that is better, or as good as TFS or JIRA... I like TFS, but non-VS projects are a pain... and JIRA is just well, not pleasant at all. Once they have some sort of better issue tracking system, then migration tooling will become another big issue in that space.. getting from SVN+JIRA or TFS itself would be really useful to a lot of orgs, willing to pay. Something between TFS and Axosoft's OnTime would be pretty nice as an addition to GH. Another area with a lot of potential would be a CI/CD toolset that uses your own cloud.. EX: you use api keys for Azure, GCE, AWS, DO etc, and then you can setup testing/limits and Github could just manage the provisioning of the test servers, and ease setup/deployment of test/stage/prod classes of servers for multiple languages. GH wouldn't have to manage a huge infrastructure itself, just build/sell tooling that extends it's current product line.

sandGorgon 11y ago

I would build a Slack alternative + Jira alternative that is deeply integrated into Github. QED.

tsuresh 11y ago

GitHub wiki is a repo and can be cloned locally. Searching through a local files is trivial.

mellett68 11y ago
I'd argue that's still a bit of a pain compared to a fulltext search in the browser. I can already search the rest of the repo and issues that way, so why not the wiki? Good tip though.

jarjoura 11y ago

My biggest pet-peeve about GitHub is its issue tracker system. It's great for one-off issues or tracking a pull-request, but beyond that its design is super unwieldy. Such a missed opportunity to crush JIRA, et. al.

anton_gogolev 11y ago
What do you miss the most or find cumbersome or unusable?
- bqe 11y ago
  - Issues that span multiple projects - Searching all issues for an organization - Voting on issues (not just :+1:) - Public issues for private repos - Attaching files (repros, necessary files, etc.) - Dependencies/links - Priority (you can label priority but not sort by it) - Metrics of any kind
  - ma138 11y ago
    Check out ZenHub - https://www.zenhub.io/ https://www.zenhub.io/ It adds these features to improve the GitHub Issue tracker directly into GitHub.com, allowing you to: - Display issues on a task board by priority and progress - Attach any file type to an issue - Add estimates and view burndown charts / metrics attached to them - +1 issues to avoid excess comments - Improved search functionality - Link repos together to view issues that span multiple projects Without having to context switch out to a separate issue tracker or UI ---- Disclosure - I work at ZenHub, and use it with GitHub all day :D

brobdingnagian 11y ago

The ability to search your own gists!

kevinSuttle 11y ago

I started this as well: https://github.com/kevinSuttle/github/issues https://github.com/kevinSuttle/github/issues (not the same Kevin as link author)

danielsamuels 11y ago

I've gotta say, I strongly disagree with this: > GitHub already has a great code search At some point in the last year or so Github rolled out a new search engine which drastically reduced it's usefulness. Any moderately complex search query now has all of the modifiers and key bits stripped out making your search results unnecessarily cluttered and somewhat useless. I consider it to be one of the worst parts of the site these days.

davidcelis 11y ago
I really wish there were some way to run code searches against branches/commits that aren't HEAD. If there is, it's not obvious.
jberryman 11y ago
I regret every single time I try to use github search, even for the most basic "where is X defined" type queries.
anshukla 11y ago
Depending on what you're trying to search for, maybe something intelligent like Sourcegraph would work?
justinhj 11y ago
Git grep is really fantastic, if github search came close I'd be delighted
- p8952 11y ago
  Could you please elaborate on what parts of git-grep you find most useful?
johnbellone 11y ago
GitHub has horrible search.

felixgallo 11y ago

These are great, but they're bugfixes. You'd finish them in the first few months. Then what are you going to do? Stare at an aquarium all day? Here's what I would build if I worked at github: * Github CI - simple CI for every language, integrating with: * Github Artifacts - repository for versioned deployable build packages (binaries, tar.gz files, ios builds, android builds...), integrating with: * Github Deploy - deploy tooling for deploying runnable artifacts or artifact combinations to either your own infrastructure, or to aws/azure/google, or: * Github Cloud - instances/containers as a service and the 'fork' button would be a pulldown that would include the options 'fork', 'fork and test', 'fork, test and deploy'. Now that's a nice little 3-4 year career.

holic 11y ago
Maybe a more apt title would be "Things I would fix if I worked at GitHub". :)
jxm262 11y ago
A github CI would be awesome! I imagine it would get very costly for them though. I love Travis-CI and the easy integration, but it's too expensive for my non-open source projects.
- sytse 11y ago
  GitHub CI might happen sooner rather than later https://twitter.com/j2h/status/627114183621013504 https://twitter.com/j2h/status/627114183621013504 Anyway, if you want it today consider using our GitLab CI https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/ it is free if you bring your own runner.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
I can't tell if there was a satirical subtext about aggressive expansion in this post, what with "Now that's a nice little 3-4 year career."
panic 11y ago
You'd finish them in the first few months. I bet you could work on small polish issues like this for a lifetime and never finish. There's always something to improve.

thinkbohemian 11y ago

Better filters for emails. Would love to subscribe to only new issues on a repo or random issues on a repo. Basically http://codetriage.com http://codetriage.com

tracker1 11y ago
For that matter, on the issues page, and labels/markers for new issues vs. old ones with a "me too" comment. or for that matter issues that you've commented on. I follow a couple dozen projects and after a couple days, my GH notifications page gets insane. Making issues more usable would be a big win imho. Also, a "priority" follows would be nice too.. so your org/project issues can be viewed separately from your follows. Seeing adoption of something closer to ontime/tfs/jira would be nice too.

qntmfred 11y ago

https://github.com/isaacs/github https://github.com/isaacs/github has a ton of these missing features

Buetol 11y ago

Just see the top requested features: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Acomments-desc https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aop... * Change the target branch of a pull request pull-requests * Delete / remove an issue completely. * Gist comments and mentions don't trigger notifications * Add HTTPS support to Github Pages * Add ability to follow organizations like a user * Insert automatically generated table of contents TOC on rendered markdown files like README.md. * pre { tab-size: 4 }

beltex 11y ago
> Add HTTPS support to Github Pages This is technically already available, though not officially documented anywhere [1]. Example [2] [1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/156#issuecomment-37747957 https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/156#issuecomment-377... [2] https://beltex.github.io https://beltex.github.io
- holic 11y ago
  While that's true, I think the discussion in that issue has gone more towards HTTPS support for custom domains.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    You could always use CloudFlare directly for that... I would presume that their underlying connection to Github is very close and reliable in terms of risk for MITM.
    - kirushik 11y ago
      Even better, you could CNAME your custom domain into the *.github.io domain, which is protected by a wildcard https. So you traffic between CloudFlare and GitHub will also be secured.
      - holic 11y ago

kzhahou 11y ago

They'll need another $100 million to get these done! (Yes, by which I am saying their website has not improved much given their massive funding)

bqe 11y ago
It's actually very surprising how little visible improvement GitHub has had in the past few years. What are they working on?
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Marketing by the looks of it. I have to say I like what Gitlab is doing these days much more than GitHub.
  - sytse 11y ago
    Glad to hear that, our company and community tries to keep shipping!
- omni 11y ago
  Projects like Atom which have basically nothing to do with their core service?
- rkuykendall-com 11y ago
  https://github.com/blog https://github.com/blog Lots of things. Github ships features like crazy. Lots of the features I use every single day were only released in the last few months. On a scale of years, all of their desktop clients, which are a huge experience improvement for new users.

sytse 11y ago

Great list, we're working on making something that makes +1's less noisey. If you want the possibility to contribute to the tools you use daily consider using our GitLab. It is open source and more than 800 people have contributed already.

qmr 11y ago
Why is there no IPv6 support?
- sytse 11y ago
  I think GitLab supports it https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/412 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/412 but we have not had the time to set it up for GitLab.com yet. We'll be moving our infrastructure to Azure soon so it is not a priority for us now.

jpdlla 11y ago

* Search code in a branch other than master. * Advanced code search inside a repo(match searches with symbols, etc.)

epberry 11y ago

Wiki search is #1 on my wish list for Github. I see others talking about cloning the wiki repo locally and searching it but for big projects this would be the equivalent of downloading something like the Python docs and searching them. It could be done but it would be a massive pain in the ass. I have written most of the documentation for the project I contribute to the most and I organized the wiki like a two level tree where a top level page has links to category pages and each page on the wiki is linked to from one of those category pages. Then there are links interspersed among the pages like a normal wiki. This structure works okay but I know it can be better because sometimes I cannot even find information that I produced!

lochlan 11y ago
If you use Chrome you have an option here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/github-wiki-search/gdifdhnjmjaidbajhapmbcbnoocoeooc?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/github-wiki-search...
- epberry 11y ago
  Awesome, already used this twice. Thanks!

rocky1138 11y ago

Search can be easily worked around by using Google with the site: parameter, e.g., search on Google with this query: wireless site:https://github.com/esp8266/esp8266-wiki/wiki https://github.com/esp8266/esp8266-wiki/wiki

holic 11y ago
Great tip, but unfortunately that doesn't work for private repos.

eam 11y ago

Getting notifications/emails when a new release is released of a repo I'm watching or have starred would be awesome!

jellekralt 11y ago
For the time being you could use Sibbell: https://sibbell.com/ https://sibbell.com/

mpdehaan2 11y ago

This is a really good list. As for sorting things by file, here's a pretty cool project to do that using GitHub API - https://github.com/sivel/pr-triage https://github.com/sivel/pr-triage

fiatjaf 11y ago

A better way to browse forks. If today you see that a major repository has a fork with a lot of commits, you cannot know without looking through THEM ALL if they are just typo fixes or if the fork is really changing/improving things over the main repo.

danieltillett 11y ago
This. The amount of time I have wasted looking in forks is staggering.
- knappe 11y ago
  100% agree. I wish there was some way to also promote a fork, other than changing the readme to point to the new fork, which also means mucking up the history of the project.
z1mm32m4n 11y ago
One way that has served me as being a pretty good metric of what's what when it comes to forks looking at the number of stars the parent and child repos have. If a fork has started to usurp it's parent, it generally has a fair deal of its own stars.

electic 11y ago

I would also like to see GitHub Chat. Complete Slack killer with the same heart and spirit of Atom.

foolfoolz 11y ago

git hubs worst problem: FIXED WIDTH CODE READING code is read way more often than written. and on github website all you can do is read it. why the viewports don't take up the entire screen width i will never understand.

baddox 11y ago
Yeah, that's a puzzling one. I've been using a browser script for a long time now to make the code view full width.
- gknoy 11y ago
  I don't use it often, but I have a Javascript bookmark [0] that I use in Chrome when the 100-character width is excessively abused. Over time, I found I dislike using it enough that I now try to limit my lines to 100 characters in my editor, so that my github diff presentation is easier to read. I'm sure there's an easier way to do this. I'm pretty certain I cribbed the method of setting a style from a StackOverflow article or other thing found online, but that was three years ago so I do not recall where it was. (Sorry.) I think all I did was poke around the Chrome debugger until I found the styles I needed. 0: https://gist.github.com/gknoy/0cc03a6401103bf41daf https://gist.github.com/gknoy/0cc03a6401103bf41daf
jjgreen 11y ago
It is long lines which damage readability, and that is the fault of the gonk who wrote the code. If anything, GH's fixed-width design encourages shorter lines and so improves readability.

davidcelis 11y ago

For the "voting on issues" feature I'd really just love to see them clone Slack's recent "Emoji Reactions" feature.

fogonthedowns 11y ago

I would really like to have the ability to Edit commit messages using the web interface. I'm often stuck with a poorly crafted message and an edit function would help that.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago

I'd kill for merge conflict resolution in the web UI.

jkmcf 11y ago

Better blame history navigation, functionally the same as how Textmate does it. 1. git blame file 2. click on a hash for the change 3. show the file for that change Right now, (3) shows you the diff for the hash

andrewbinstock 11y ago

By far the biggest thing I wish github would do is change the text entry beside the file names. Right now, it shows the comment of the last push of edits to that file. That's great for members of the project. However, for non-members it would be far more useful to know what the file is. Here, enabling a one-line description would be hugely helpful. Since GH knows if you're a member of the project it can show you the right text--description or latest update. And presumably, a button would allow you to see the other text if you needed it.

hyperion2010 11y ago
If you don't know where to look it can take a surprisingly long time to find things like: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/HOWTO https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/.... It is obvious once you know, but unless you know are in the habit of checking all the 'likely places' such a doc would be you are going to be lost. While one could allow annotations on top of files in github it would completely fragment real and important documentation efforts and leave information scattered in 10 different locations that no one could pull back together.

TheRealWatson 11y ago

I always wished GitHub had a chat room per repo. Fully integrated with github features, like mentions, issues, pull requests. Maybe even hubot builtin.

hyperion2010 11y ago
gitter?

TheRealWatson 11y ago

It's very common, at least on my team, to create pull requests for the wrong target branch. I don't see why GitHub doesn't allow you to fix it before any comments are posted. This would save some useful time.

choward 11y ago

> These are great, but they're bugfixes. I agree with every you said but that first sentence. How are these bugs? They are features that never existed.

kranzky 11y ago

Things I would build: * Push conflicted branches so developers in a distributed team can work together to resolve conflicts. * A git-powered version of Rake, which runs only those tests that need to be run based on the git history since the last run. * A tool to identify what code changes caused a particular test to fail, based on the above. * Language syntax detection for smarter diffs, improving the display when blocks of code are moved around or indented/outdented. * Language linters built in, to detect when a change is introducing a syntax error. Same for coding style. I'd also move the "Close Pull Request" button a little farther away from the "Comment" button, and make it possible to add comments to a diff when you've hidden whitespace differences (with `&w=1`... I'd also make it a bit more obvious that you could do that).

pbiggar 11y ago
> * A git-powered version of Rake, which runs only those tests that need to be run based on the git history since the last run. I think you mean "magic". That is, this is not possible :) Not that I wouldn't like it to be.
- kranzky 11y ago
  Well, it is kind-of possible for Ruby/Rails. I half-built such a system once. Here's what you do: * Gather coverage information when running tests or compiling assets. * Use that to generate Rakefiles for running tests / compiling assets that have dependencies on the source files they would touch. * Run the tests once, recording information about the git status of each dependency. * When the git status of a file changes (i.e. you've just fetched some changes), mark the dependency as dirty Even better, it you're gathering coverage data and know the test status for each commit, then not only can you show the commit that broke the build, you can show the particular part of the diff that broke the build. Here's a guy who was trying to do some of this: https://github.com/Genki-S/ttnt https://github.com/Genki-S/ttnt

hlfcoding 11y ago

An unordered list of missing features from me: - No ability to store the tab size setting. While appending '?ts=2' to the url is ok, it's not convenient and usable on a daily basis. The same for omitting whitespace changes in a diff / pr ('?ws=1'). - No ability to step through history on a single file while in blob view, or blame view. In blame view, the commit link goes to the commit, not the blame of the file at that commit. - Agree with OP that notifications need to be grouped / summarized better. Perhaps expandable summary items per repo per type. This is mostly useful for private, work-related repos. Pulse and notifications are basically the same thing. - Stars cannot be tagged. This makes managing hundreds of stars difficult. There's apps like Astral, but even those are lacking.

adamnemecek 11y ago

I would make the search results deduplicated. It happens to me a lot that I search for something and the first 10 pages of search results are from the same 5 projects, but from different locations within the single projects. I usually lose patience sometime around page 5.

arikrak 11y ago

I feel one could have more ambitious goals. E.g. Could Github build a powerful developers careers site based on all the data they have? Could they provide more tools to help people program? (Could they automatically create programs? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9973088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9973088)

simonw 11y ago

The biggest thing I want from GitHub is the ability to search commits. GitHub are pretty good at search (their issue search is fantastic, and their code search is decent enough) - but the data I most want to search are the commit messages in my repo. I understand this will be a huge amount of data (they must have hundreds of millions if not billions of commits by now). I'd be perfectly happy if this was only available for paid repositories. The ability to then further facet and filter searches by author, file, directory etc would be unbelievably useful.

simonw 11y ago
Oh, and while we're talking pony requests... I'd dearly love to be able to use gists within the scope of an organization. It would be fantastic to be able to share code snippets that were only visible to other organization members (and searchable and so on).
- iancarroll 11y ago
  I know this isn't exactly what you want, but GitHub Enterprise comes with Gist.

andrewchambers 11y ago

One thing that has bitten me is the code review submitting each line of feedback instantly, before you have finished reviewing the whole pull request.

piotrkaminski 11y ago
Check out https://reviewable.io https://reviewable.io to fix this (disclosure: I built it).

bronson 11y ago

How about making pull requests less centralized? Right now, if I file a PR, only the project admins or I can modify/rebase it. I'd like to give other (non-admin) collaborators permission to work on it too. Or, maybe it could use a forking model? Let anyone fork their own PR from mine, make those forks prominently visible in my base PR, and make it easy for me to merge their edits back in.

teddyh 11y ago
If you want anything less centralized, then why are you using Github, a centralized interface to and storage of a previously inherently de-centralized system, git? Github is for people who accept centralization.
- bronson 11y ago
  That's not true. Why do you think github promotes forking and pull requests? Some centralization is necessary, true, but you seem to be confusing GitHub with Google Code and SourceForge.

stevekemp 11y ago

I see people here posting issues of their own, but I'm amazed nobody has yet mentioned the lack of IPv6. I've setup a few machines with IPv6-only network connections, and it makes pulling my dotfiles from github a pain since I need an IPv4-proxy/tunnel to access github.com

justincormack 11y ago
Given up complaining for now. They just don't seem to get it.

pietherr 11y ago

Things @teabass would build if he quit GitHub: https://libraries.io https://libraries.io Really useful to get updates on new releases of libraries you use.

fred2133 11y ago

Github Firehose if it was me. Something to build tools on top of.

jafingi 11y ago

+1 ;-)

masklinn 11y ago

> The suggested alternative is to "Subscribe" to an issue for updates, which is what I've started doing to issues that I want to show my support for. My support, however, isn't visible to anyone else. Though following the resolution of an issue usually means I'd like for it to be resolved, the converse isn't true: I've hit thousands of issues over the years but most of the time I've been able to work around them and haven't hit it since, resolving the issue would be nice for people coming after me, but I don't really care to be spammed by its status updates. So yes, "subscribe" could count as a +1, but no "subscribe" should not be the only way to "+1" an issue.

Jemaclus 11y ago

The only thing I really, really want is paginated diffs for pull requests. C'mon. If I have 300 files, don't show me the first 15 and then say "well, this is too big, you'll just have to imagine what the rest of the diff looks like." Does Google return the first page and then say "the rest of the internet isn't available to you because we don't want to paginate things"? No, of course not. Just freaking paginate long diffs. Gah.