
Repository Next - Lightning
https://github.com/blog/1529-repository-next
======
shardling
Hmm, as someone who spends most of their time on github looking at pull
requests and issues, this seems a step backwards.

Not a huge one, but it was nicer to have my most frequent points of
interaction at the top. I deal with the code itself in my local repo. I don't
need to know how many commits/branches/tags/contributors there are -- _that_
is the redundant info for me, and _that_ should have been shoved to the side.

If I'm using github's UI, it's because I'm managing a project. Might be nice
to have a separate "management" interface you can opt into?

 _tldr:_ They moved all the "extra" stuff to the side, while keeping the info
directly related to the git repo in the center. But the whole point of using
github is the value they add, not the core functionality that I can already
get through my commandline!

~~~
DanielRibeiro
My biggest gripe with it has been the lack of syntax highlighting for pull
requests.

Because of that I've been maintaining my personal fix for this:
[https://github.com/danielribeiro/github-diff-
highlight](https://github.com/danielribeiro/github-diff-highlight)

It would definitely be nice to see it supported natively by GitHub.

~~~
zsombor
Does it also work when the syntax is outside of the diff context? I.e. think a
html comment that started in an a prior insertion hunk? We had encountered a
lot of edge cases whilst building the syntax highlighted diffs for
[https://www.tixef.com](https://www.tixef.com) It is a tricky domain, hats of
to you for attempting it in JavaScript!

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Thanks!

The highlihght is pretty much constrained to diff (on pull requests, commits
and compares[1]), but it could work on any page. I've mentioned[2] how I used
jquery-syntaxhighlighter to do it, which itself is a fork of Google's Prettify
in order to do the heavy lifting of syntax discovery and actual highlight.

[1] [https://github.com/danielribeiro/github-diff-
highlight/blob/...](https://github.com/danielribeiro/github-diff-
highlight/blob/master/src/header.js#L2)

[2] [https://github.com/danielribeiro/github-diff-
highlight#hacki...](https://github.com/danielribeiro/github-diff-
highlight#hacking)

------
ericras
>> replaced with a slim, de-emphasized icon-based navigation.

This is the same problem I had with a Gmail redesign a while back. Using icons
looks nice and allows for slimmer navigation but it decreases ease of use for
me. I can find things much quicker with text labels.

~~~
hkarthik
This is a common problem that UI professionals often refer to as "Mystery Meat
Navigation".
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation)

It was pretty common during the 90s when screen resolutions were really low
and preserving space was a big deal. We're seeing it again now because of
mobile friendly responsive designs dealing with the same issue.

~~~
pseut
I'm curious how many people browse github from their smartphones. Right now
I'm on my desktop and see a pretty column of unlabeled icons, right next to
_three inches_ of unused whitespace between the icons and the edge of the
frame. It's a somewhat inefficient use of space...

~~~
compay
Probably very few. The site is currently very, very difficult to use on
anything smaller than a tablet.

------
chintan
Just other day, I spent 30 secs (or more) looking for the repo URL on
Bitbucket.

Then I thought how awesome GitHub was and it really understood users. It
always had the big repo url on front and top where one can never miss it.

In this new design, GitHub has pushed it on to bottom right and reduced the
input size. Bad Decision IMHO.

~~~
simonz05
They added a green button which i assume is "fork on github". It seems they
want to encourage people to use github rather to clone to local filesystem.

~~~
shardling
They've always had a quite prominent "fork on github" button.

Their suggested course of action is to fork on github and _then_ clone to your
local filesystem. You then push changes to your fork on github, and open a
pull request from within their system.

The default workflow is designed to play nice with their issue tracker/etc.

------
alberth
For a direct comparison of the same repository (Etsy's Skyline) redesigned,
see the before and after redesign links below:

\- Current/Old
[https://github.com/etsy/skyline](https://github.com/etsy/skyline)

\- New/Redsigned
[https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1354/660756/cc8cad9c-d714-...](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1354/660756/cc8cad9c-d714-11e2-81de-
ff48d7209bf4.jpg)

EDIT: typo

~~~
stephth
The new design looks stunning next to the older one - which already looked
good.

Am I the only one wishing the readme was above the file list? In my case, I
often read the readme and rarely look at the files, and as a landing page
standpoint it seems logical that the readme would be front facing instead of
hidden at the bottom. I'm curious what's the reasoning behind that order,
since it's been that way forever and GitHub seems to be fairly dedicated to
elegant and thoughtful design while being open to change, I imagine there must
be a good explanation.

~~~
reledi
That would be quite annoying with large READMEs. I could see it being useful
the first time I view a project, but any time after that there's a good chance
that I'd rather see the file list.

------
olalonde
I really wish Github would bring back issues search and would stop making the
top search bar default to the current repository. I constantly search
something there and always forget to select "Search all Github". That being
said, I think it's good that they are reducing the clutter.

~~~
Gazler
Yeah, me too. It happens to me at least daily. I don't think I have ever
wanted to search within the repository and it certainly shouldn't be default.
In fact, I might write a browser extension to make it global by default again.

I don't mind the navigation being on the right, but the clone url doesn't
appear on most repositories which is one of the most important elements of the
repo.

~~~
olalonde
Good idea, I just wrote a Chrome extension: [https://github.com/olalonde/gh-
globalsearch](https://github.com/olalonde/gh-globalsearch)

------
danbmil99
Call me a Luddite, when a tool I use every day is completely redesigned, and
marketed with phrases like "The content is the interface", I begin to shit my
pants.

It's especially scary because there's no rollback. At least I still have gnome
desktop, for now...

~~~
herge
GitHub issues is another kettle of fish, but does anything force you to use
the github interface to use the repositories? Forking, or making buckets?

You can host a copy of your repo on github, another on, say, bitbucket, and
another on gitorious, and as long as you take care of syncing between them,
you should be alright, right?

~~~
danbmil99
Fair point. I actually use Issues a lot, I find it great for small projects
where I don't have the time or energy to set up bugzilla or trac etc. I like
the way you can browse branches and commits, see your repos, start a new
project with a README and so on. I can imagine using the wiki more than I
have.

I just get this queasy feeling that this might be one of those over-thought
reworkings, where they do everything they thought they would do years ago
before the site took off. Sometimes that works, but usually it's a disaster.
Incremental changes, with lots of feedback from real users, seems to be the
better way for a site with a solid core of happy users to evolve.

------
bhauer
I just switched over to the new design and I like it. My favorite part: no
more silly horizontal sliding animation. Thank you so much for removing that.

Though--and I hate to sound ungrateful--Github has always seemed slow and
unfortunately this new design doesn't help as much as I hoped it would when I
read about it. I acknowledge that the new design is quicker, and removing the
animation makes the wait for a response considerably less annoying, but Github
remains a slow site to navigate. Put as positively as I can: thank you for
working on performance, and please continue to do so.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
I noticed the missing animation, too. Now I feel suddenly nostalgic about it.

------
spankalee
This might be a nice update, I'll opt-int for some projects and try it out,
but it doesn't address my biggest problem with GitHub: the lack of decent code
review tools.

I have to use an external review tool like Reitveld to get side-by-side diffs
and better comment and patch-set management.

~~~
miloshadzic
So far I've been happy with using pull requests for that.

~~~
spankalee
I just can't review without side-by-side diffs. The res of GitHub is so
wonderful, I wish they'd add it.

------
transfire
Can't say I like the new look. The pjax improvements are great, of course. But
moving all the top menus to a right-hand sidebar just doesn't work well. How
glaring is it when the cloning uri, which is wide sequence of letters, is
squeezed into a narrow sidebar and thus mostly cutoff. It is is awful. Did
they consider drop down menus if it was really necessary to reduce the clutter
at the top of the page? Otherwise move the navigation menu to the left and
allow the page to fill the screen.

Sorry to be negative. I appreciate work to improve things, some of these
changes just aren't. Hope they keep working on it.

------
mattmanser
I have never understood the reason for putting the commit comments of some
random file within it next to the folder name.

It's unnecessary noise and what would be far more useful is how many files and
folders that folder actually contained.

To be honest I don't really see the point of putting the comments next to the
file name either.

Also, I wish for the love of god that they put the file size there.

Then again my primary use case of github is reading code to learn and having a
nosey at how good a coder someone is, so I'm generally looking for the bulk of
a program, hence the usefulness of file size and the uselessness of commit
comments.

~~~
jrochkind1
It is, of course, not just some random file -- it's the file that has the most
recent commit in that directory.

Or rather, it's the commit message from the most recent commit in that
directory (it's not so much about files at all).

I find it quite useful, to see if there have been any recent changes in that
directory (and specifically when and what) or if it hasn't been changed in
years.

~~~
mattmanser
I didn't say remove how many days since the last change, that is very useful.
The commit message itself? I don't think so.

~~~
jrochkind1
I guess the repo's you look at don't write very good commit messages?

If you find the number of days since last change useful... why wouldn't you
also find it useful to know what was changed in that last change? That's what
the commit message tells you, right?

(and the commit message is also the place you click on in the github ui to see
the full commit with diff etc)

------
nfm
A few quick first thoughts, having just flipped the switch. I think the
description and website fields should be click to edit (and the labels need to
be wired up). And I'm not a fan of the increasing emphasis on % LOC by
programming language - this seems like an extremely low value metric to be so
prominent, and a terrible way to distinguish between repos!

I'm looking forward to digging more into the redesign in my usage of it today.
Glad to see GitHub continuing to improve and happy to re-think the current
state of the app.

------
wyck
So I am supposed to know brown means assembly and javascript is orange , oh
and coffeescript is dark blue..and so on and so on.

~~~
andyhmltn
Click it! This was in the old design, just not as prominent

------
sktrdie
I absolutely love how GitHub is always at the cutting edge. Always improving.
Always making it better.

Steve Jobs' "stay hungry. stay foolish" applies perfectly to GitHub's
attitude.

Keep up the great work!

~~~
eightyone
I don't mean to nitpick, but that's actually a quote from one of the last
issues of The Whole Earth Catalog.

[http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog](http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog)

~~~
joyeuse6701
Yeah that's where he got the quote from, but he popularized it in the context
that we use the phrase in, so I think it's ok =)

------
MattRix
Just started using it and like it SO MUCH better. Everything feels much
cleaner and easier to absorb at a glance. Love it!

------
julien_c
I think that overall it's a nice, welcome change. The double tab bar was
getting a bit odd.

I just think that the alignment of the right vertical icon bar is a bit off, I
think it'd be better off-canvas.

The emphasis on speed is great. I hope they'll improve keyboard navigation
with this release as well.

------
sauravc
It looks like the code viewing area was narrowed. If the redesign was meant to
put more focus on content, this decision is perplexing.

I wish they'd make a responsive design that would make use of my 24" monitor.
Right now I've resorted to writing a Chrome plugin to widen the code viewing
area via CSS.

[http://github.com/sauravc/github_wideload](http://github.com/sauravc/github_wideload)

~~~
Vieira
> It looks like the code viewing area was narrowed.

Doesn't look like it[1].

I'm not sure that a much wider github would be of use to me. Most projects
usually place some kind of limitation on the number of characters per line and
even in the file browser I don't find filenames long enough to take that kind
of space. Maybe you have some other use cases worth sharing?

[1]
[https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1354/660780/2e217312-d715-...](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1354/660780/2e217312-d715-11e2-8f85-1bf113741786.jpg)

~~~
sauravc
My team's inherited code (legacy code) where not all lines are trimmed to 80
or even 120 chars. Long file names or deeply nested directories aren't
something I run into currently, but I recall running into them on several J2EE
apps in the past.

------
mrinterweb
I dislike the right side persistent navigation bar. It takes up considerable
room and it makes the page unbalanced as you scroll down. I prefer the content
to take up the full width and to be centered. When you scroll down on a long
page, the navigation scrolls out of view and content is off center. When I
code, I prefer to designate the majority of my screen to the code. The right
navigation column seems like wasted space.

~~~
snowwolf
This was my first impression too. Especially when viewing the Readme for a
project it's much narrower and feels more squashed. They seem to of focused on
the project owner use case and ignored the project user use case.

------
zachgersh
No matter whether you love or hate the new UI, github is going to actively
iterate on this design and improve it.

I can't tell you how many times I have had a github tab open and then popped
open another and my layout has slightly changed (like shrinking a font or
changing colors). They don't stop with UI tweaks until they think things are
perfect.

Expect this to continue to evolve even without another major release from
them.

------
minikomi
First impressions and all that but .. Wow, that language bar is pretty jarring
- especially when the main language is Javascript (bright red).

------
rubyn00bie
I think this redesign is pretty bad for UX but great for design (e.g. it's
pretty but useless).

1.) You cannot make a PR from the main repo page anymore, you must go to a
branch.

2.) The number of commits is emphasized over the number of pull requests, WTF?
This one just blows me away.

3.) The whole PR process itself is largely more complicated and requires many
more clicks (e.g. trying to swich repos is a bitch, and you have to click just
to see the drop down, which then disappears after you select one).

4.) The right hand navigation bar is more or less worthless and too small.

5.) Moving the link to clone/co to the bottom right of the page is silly and
totally makes it harder to find/use. I still don't see how this can be less
important than the number of commits...

I still love github, it looks nice, it's just totally unusable. Feels like an
April Fool's day joke come early with bad taste.

------
sudhirj
Think there are two problems here:

1\. For people visiting their own repositories, the viewing the code itself
has little to no value. They more than likely already have it open in their
editor / IDE in another window. These folks probably want the issues, PRs and
other accompanying features. Collaboration is now the key - not the code
itself.

2\. For other people (non-committers) looking at a repo, this is different.
When I visit other codebases I do actually look at the code to check certain
things - what style it is, what frameworks have been used, how complicated the
code is, if tests are present etc. Then I check to see what kind of (any how
many) issues have been raised.

It might actually make sense to show a different view depending on whether you
have commit permissions to the repo or not.

------
redbad
Cool. Seems like their head is in the right place: designing for productivity
and usability. Kudos.

------
gkop
The first thing I looked for is "Did they remove a horizontal nav bar?", and
they did! Nice job GitHub, I look forward to opting-in.

------
jamesbrennan
I just opted into the new design and I can attest that it is _very_ responsive
and browsing code is noticeably quicker than before.

------
alberth
I'm surprised Github didn't ease users into this new redesign by simply
updating _just_ the top navigation first.

Photoshop: [http://i.imgur.com/MR9nzmH.png](http://i.imgur.com/MR9nzmH.png)

Based on the negative comments below, just updating the top navigation
(solely) seems like it would have appeased everyone.

------
philfreo
I think there are some great improvements here (putting content at the front
and center more).

I feel like it takes me a minute to figure out what page I'm on now though,
due to less navigational context. Perhaps something like this would help:

[http://cl.ly/image/252t3J1h0k28](http://cl.ly/image/252t3J1h0k28)

~~~
joelg236
I'd really like to see the navigation be part of the name. It makes sense.

------
dfc
It would be wonderful if you could sort by ctime in the file list view. Bonus
points if the the right aligned relative dates could be printed in rfc3339
format. As it is the right aligned relative dates can be disorienting when you
scan down the list looking for what has been changed recently.

------
justinjlynn
When in a repository, shift-clicking on a file link no longer opens the link
in a new window. Oops.

~~~
steveklabnik
Isn't that control-click, not shift-click?

~~~
graywh
ctrl-click to open in a background tab works for me, but shift-click to open
in a new window does not

------
Stratoscope
I just hope they get rid of the side-scrolling when navigating code. It really
bothers my eyes.

~~~
zsombor
Tixef.com extends the line to fill the full length of the browser window. If
the line is still does not fit, then it is wrapped and icon is inserted to
indicate the fact. If you have an office then you probably also own a large
monitor if not several of. There is really no sense of keeping fixed layouts
nowadays in a product targeted towards professionals.

[disclaimer: Tixef is my project so I may be a bit over the top about it]

~~~
mh-
_(unsolicited opinion)_

I'd be more interested in keeping my hosting on GitHub but using more
sophisticated code review/workflow tools than they offer.

Have you considered targeting this use case? Their API is robust and includes
sufficient access controls. I'm surprised no one is doing this yet.

~~~
zsombor
To provide review tools you need the code as well as its full history. An API
is not going to cut it.

However Git being the beautiful distributed system as it is, you don't have to
move your hosting. In fact you can push to multiple Git remotes, or use one
for backup, or just for reviews.

You can also push to multiple remotes at the same time by adding two urls for
the origin. So if you like the idea of your source files residing on a
particular provider then you can keep it there as well.

Heroku works in a similar way, you may store your repo elsewhere but deploys
happen when you push to their remote.

The true API here is Git itself not some silly and constantly changing REST
protocol over something as stable the Git Object Model.

~~~
mh-
_Have you considered targeting this use case?_

so in short: no. :)

(FYI, their API provides access to all the git objects and would also allow
you to add additional keys so you could clone it.)

------
c-oreills
There doesn't seem to be a way to opt out. I can't create a pull request from
dev to master any more, it shows me the compare page but only gives me to a
link to an existing pull request to dev. Merging on the command line it is,
then. =/

------
purephase
I'll reserve judgement until I use it but it does look promising.

Now, if they could solve that nasty problem wherein the issues list seems to
revert to an earlier revision when you use the browser button I would be a
happy camper.

------
niutech
I prefer the good old top menu rather than the new one on the right side.

------
tagliala
I really don't like the time shifted on the right.

Since time is a small field, before I was able to read

file__time_comment__________ without any problem

now I see

file__comment________________time

I'm disoriented :(

------
snowwrestler
The new layout doesn't seem like a very big change, but if the speed claims
are correct that would be a big improvement.

------
jontro
The ability to not switch branches from the commits view is frustrating. I
really want to switch back to the old look.

------
ksec
Doubled Down on Pjax and Caching, i wonder if they are using Rails 4.0
already.

------
apathetic
Is there any way to revert to the old one?

------
ing33k
will take some time to get used to it..

------
targusman
I prefer bit bucket but my job makes use GitHub.

------
targusman
This update is driving me crazy.

------
omegote
I wonder why the heck they include the Mac OS X app chrome. What's the point?
You're wasting a lot of space in the screenshot with useless content. Is it
just to show off your mac? It's a website for god's sake, it looks essentially
the same in any operating system.

~~~
udp
The screenshot has to be contained in something to separate it from the page
around it, and window chrome makes it feel a lot more real and less like a
mockup. A black border or something wouldn't quite have the same effect.

~~~
omegote
The CSS for the images in the post already adds some padding and a 1px border,
so there you have your separation.

