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> I can read source code in a Github repo on my phone on the bus (and I sometimes do! In anger, in upstream repos when trying to debug sudden production issues

> I can read source code in a Github repo on my phone on the bus (and I sometimes do! In anger, in upstream repos when trying to debug sudden production issues while on my way home!) I can't really read code in a zip file on my phone. I find this double ironic, because _every single phone_ I've ever had since the 90s has had no problem being able to download, unzip and view plain text files. Yet not a single phone I've ever had is able to decently browse the JS-loaded monster of a website that github.com is. Not even the one I'm using right now. Even on my desktop it still much easier to view a plain text file, not to mention more responsive and reflowable, than the Github website.

Zambyte 3y ago
Ok I'll bite, what kind of phone do you have? I have a phone from 6 years ago and I use the GitHub web UI on it almost daily. It's far from great but it certainly is usable.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  Why it would be more troubling a phone that can't browse Github.com than a phone that can't open plain text files on a sub-megabyte .zip file as derefr apparently has ? Github.com frontpage itself is already several megabytes. By your own text your 6 year old phone (more than capable) "is far from great". That's the point... My phone can checkout this repository (or unzip the corresponding .zip file), and even under emulation layer build MS-DOS from it. Browsing Github.com is on the other hand a struggle. But it should be obvious; there is _no way_ browsing plain text files wouldn't be more far more responsive and pleasant than browsing such a loaded website. Github is just a disservice here.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    > By your own text your 6 year old phone (more than capable) "is far from great". It's mostly far from great for design reasons than for performance reasons. I barely tolerate GitHub on my powerhouse of a desktop (I don't use it for any personal projects). If you want to download the repository to browse it locally, go for it. Still curious what kind of phone you have since you didn't answer that, and I still browse GitHub (reading issues, discussions, and some code) daily on my 6 year old phone.
  - derefr 3y ago
    I mean, I probably literally "can" read text files inside a .zip file on my iPhone. It's not that it's impossible for it to do that. But I don't think I currently have an app that knows how to do it. iOS Files.ipa doesn't do that. As such, starting from zero, to "explore" the code in a .zip file on my phone, I'd have to: 1. download the .zip file in my browser; 2. go into the App Store, seek out some alternative file browser app that supports archive extraction/browsing and text-file viewing and isn't some dumb scam, and install it; 3. go back to the browser and/or the Files app, and "share" the downloaded archive file from there into this separate filer app I've downloaded (because such apps — other than Apple's specially-deigned one — can only see things handed into their specific sandbox.) 4. open the filer app; 5. open the archive inside the app (which would either extract it or traverse into it — really a roll of the dice†); 6. open the file within the archive, and read it; 7. remember to delete the archive, and potentially the extracted worktree from the archive, when I'm done. All this vs., clicking a link to the repo page; clicking a link on the repo page to one of the files in the repo; and reading. All just within the browser the phone already comes with. Maybe (in theory, if I didn't have a newer phone) chugging a bit as I scroll — but I'm reading the code, not searching it; I only need the page to refresh as quickly as I can take in the whole previous page. † And IIRC (from playing around with such filer apps with Android smart TVs), such filer apps are mostly going to only offer the ability to expand archives, rather than to traverse them. This is fine for tiny archives; but it's a very bad idea if you've got the sort of "several snapshots of internal builds/releases of the SDK scraped off of people's HDs" archive that you usually see in the corporate-software anthropology space. These snapshots usually each contain, among other things, binary tools and binary assets; and due to there being multiple snapshots in the archive, you've got a large number of redundant (often byte-identical!) copies of them (that due to the compression distance, haven't been compressed together.) Such archives therefore often add up to several GBs of data, and millions of files. You don't want to expand that onto your phone's teeny little 256GB disk just to poke around in one or two files! --- ...of course, that being said, when I'm on my laptop and on my home wi-fi, I don't read any more than trivial code on Github; that'd be silly. Instead, if I want to poke around the files of a repo, I just pop open a shell, clone the repo, and open the resulting worktree in an IDE. In theory, the best mobile workflow would do the same (but in a way that's more careful with mobile data. So maybe with a shallow git clone — or even a theoretical "thin client" clone that uses a FUSE-like layer in the app to fetch git objects one-at-a-time, just-in-time, as the IDE attempts to read them.) But note that the backend for that "best mobile workflow" would still be something that looks like https+git or git+ssh — not something that looks like an application/x-zip response from a webserver. So, in this ideal world, you'd still want the code to live in a hosted git repo somewhere!
ses1984 3y ago
Well at least from GitHub you can edit the url or click a button to download and view the raw text.
talldayo 3y ago
That sounds like a browser issue. I just whizzed through a 2000-SLOC file from llama.cpp on my 5 year old Android phone with no discernible hitching.

Zambyte 3y ago

Ok I'll bite, what kind of phone do you have? I have a phone from 6 years ago and I use the GitHub web UI on it almost daily. It's far from great but it certainly is usable.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
Why it would be more troubling a phone that can't browse Github.com than a phone that can't open plain text files on a sub-megabyte .zip file as derefr apparently has ? Github.com frontpage itself is already several megabytes. By your own text your 6 year old phone (more than capable) "is far from great". That's the point... My phone can checkout this repository (or unzip the corresponding .zip file), and even under emulation layer build MS-DOS from it. Browsing Github.com is on the other hand a struggle. But it should be obvious; there is _no way_ browsing plain text files wouldn't be more far more responsive and pleasant than browsing such a loaded website. Github is just a disservice here.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  > By your own text your 6 year old phone (more than capable) "is far from great". It's mostly far from great for design reasons than for performance reasons. I barely tolerate GitHub on my powerhouse of a desktop (I don't use it for any personal projects). If you want to download the repository to browse it locally, go for it. Still curious what kind of phone you have since you didn't answer that, and I still browse GitHub (reading issues, discussions, and some code) daily on my 6 year old phone.
- derefr 3y ago
  I mean, I probably literally "can" read text files inside a .zip file on my iPhone. It's not that it's impossible for it to do that. But I don't think I currently have an app that knows how to do it. iOS Files.ipa doesn't do that. As such, starting from zero, to "explore" the code in a .zip file on my phone, I'd have to: 1. download the .zip file in my browser; 2. go into the App Store, seek out some alternative file browser app that supports archive extraction/browsing and text-file viewing and isn't some dumb scam, and install it; 3. go back to the browser and/or the Files app, and "share" the downloaded archive file from there into this separate filer app I've downloaded (because such apps — other than Apple's specially-deigned one — can only see things handed into their specific sandbox.) 4. open the filer app; 5. open the archive inside the app (which would either extract it or traverse into it — really a roll of the dice†); 6. open the file within the archive, and read it; 7. remember to delete the archive, and potentially the extracted worktree from the archive, when I'm done. All this vs., clicking a link to the repo page; clicking a link on the repo page to one of the files in the repo; and reading. All just within the browser the phone already comes with. Maybe (in theory, if I didn't have a newer phone) chugging a bit as I scroll — but I'm reading the code, not searching it; I only need the page to refresh as quickly as I can take in the whole previous page. † And IIRC (from playing around with such filer apps with Android smart TVs), such filer apps are mostly going to only offer the ability to expand archives, rather than to traverse them. This is fine for tiny archives; but it's a very bad idea if you've got the sort of "several snapshots of internal builds/releases of the SDK scraped off of people's HDs" archive that you usually see in the corporate-software anthropology space. These snapshots usually each contain, among other things, binary tools and binary assets; and due to there being multiple snapshots in the archive, you've got a large number of redundant (often byte-identical!) copies of them (that due to the compression distance, haven't been compressed together.) Such archives therefore often add up to several GBs of data, and millions of files. You don't want to expand that onto your phone's teeny little 256GB disk just to poke around in one or two files! --- ...of course, that being said, when I'm on my laptop and on my home wi-fi, I don't read any more than trivial code on Github; that'd be silly. Instead, if I want to poke around the files of a repo, I just pop open a shell, clone the repo, and open the resulting worktree in an IDE. In theory, the best mobile workflow would do the same (but in a way that's more careful with mobile data. So maybe with a shallow git clone — or even a theoretical "thin client" clone that uses a FUSE-like layer in the app to fetch git objects one-at-a-time, just-in-time, as the IDE attempts to read them.) But note that the backend for that "best mobile workflow" would still be something that looks like https+git or git+ssh — not something that looks like an application/x-zip response from a webserver. So, in this ideal world, you'd still want the code to live in a hosted git repo somewhere!

ses1984 3y ago

Well at least from GitHub you can edit the url or click a button to download and view the raw text.

talldayo 3y ago

That sounds like a browser issue. I just whizzed through a 2000-SLOC file from llama.cpp on my 5 year old Android phone with no discernible hitching.