Coffee break #24. 5 tools to improve your GitHub experience

5 tools to improve your GitHub experience

Source: Medium GitHub is the most popular team development service. It contains countless public repositories in various programming languages. You can use GitHub to host your code and collaborate with teammates and other developers. Also, this service can be used for educational purposes: to study someone else's code, popular open source libraries and take part in their development. In addition, you can always improve GitHub by upgrading and customizing it for yourself. Here is a list of tools that can help you with this.

Awesome Autocomplete for GitHub

One of the most useful features of any search is the search query auto-completion system. And it's not even that in this way you can save time and not type your entire request completely. The main thing is that here you are offered options for requests. As you may have guessed, using the Awesome Autocomplete for GitHub browser extension, you can get autocomplete in the search bar on the GitHub site. It can be used to search both repositories and accounts of people and organizations.

GitHunt

There is one interesting feature in the GitHub functionality: there you can see a list of trending projects. That is, you can get acquainted with new tools and libraries that have recently attracted special attention and received many stars from other developers. To make it easier to discover new trends, use the GitHunt browser extension. It allows you to view trending projects in new tabs for a specific programming language per day, week or month.

GitHub Notable Comments

One of the most useful sections of GitHub, where you can find recommendations, tips or requests for help related to a specific project. In it, developers can complain about bugs, offer solutions, or offer ideas about what they think should be included in the project. If you want to navigate through comments faster and read only the most helpful ones, use the GitHub Notable Comments browser extension. After installing it, go to the Issues tab of the desired project and look at its contents. For example, you can take Issuerails project. There you will find 66 comments, but naturally you would like to read the most useful ones. A small sidebar that appears after installing the extension will help with this. This way you can instantly go to the comment that received the most reactions.

Enhanced GitHub

By installing the Enhanced GitHub extension in your Google Chrome browser, you can instantly get a download link not only for the entire repository, but for any file in it. You will also be able to copy the contents of the files. Although markup is lost when copying the code, it is still a pretty useful tool.

GitFirst

If you suddenly want to see your first commit in a project you started, or your colleague's first commit, use the Git First plugin. So you will significantly reduce the time for searching. You just need to install it in the browser, after which you will have an additional item in the context menu (by right mouse click): Initial Commit. A very handy tool that allows you to quickly see how other people start their projects.