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You can now create files on GitHub
- hardik988 14y agoThis is fantastic news. I think this qualifies Github as a complete blogging engine now, with the plethora of static site generators available.
- thirdtruck 14y agoAgreed. I've used it for a blog and a promotional site for a few months now.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- artursapek 14y agoWhat's your issue? Points are valueless you know.
- indiecore 14y agoWhat's with people complaining about the front page today? This is really cool and it saves somebody out there some work, that's value and that's worth an upvote.
- Trufa 14y agoThis is a useful feature by a site a great part of the hn users use sometimes daily, the more points, more visibility. It's an indication of its usefulness.
- RDDavies 14y agoFacebook to front page in 2004: "16 points for being able to see who my friends are?" Twitter to front page in 2005: "16 points for being able to write short messages?" eBay to front page in 1998: "16 points for being able to sell things?" It isn't about how involved or difficult a task is. Twitter wasn't "hard" to build (early on). It's about the utility of something, and this provides a great deal of utility. I don't mean my post to come off as a flame, as that's not at all what it's intended, but I, for one, find this very useful.
- swanson 14y agoInside a Jekyll repo on Github: New file button = New Post (rich editor) Branch and new file = Draft Edit button (owner) = Edit Edit button (reader) = Submit correction Pull request = Submit Guest post Pull request comment = Copy/content editor Issues = Idea/Suggestion bucket Commit button = Publish and deploy If there was a way to do the live markdown preview using the css (maybe you could inline link it?), then you have a pretty complete blog engine for hackers. This would be an awesome feature IMO. Github would then be the place where you put your code, write your blog, track your issues, paste snippets for IRC (Gist), display your business card (profile info), and host your talk slides (SpeakerDeck). The next logical step to me would be integrating conferences/user groups (ala Lanyard/Meetup.com). PS. @github feel free to hire me to help build it out :P
- masklinn 14y ago> If there was a way to do the live markdown preview using the css Render in an iframe with the right CSS linked?
- swanson 14y agoThere are several ways; but I might ways using the current Github UI.
- phleet 14y agoHave you seen Prose? http://prose.io/about.html http://prose.io/about.html
- swanson 14y agoYep - it's the same concept. But native support on Github would be cooler IMO :) And I believe it has the same issue with live preview not using your own CSS
- voltagex_ 14y agoThere's a /raw endpoint that accepts markdown and renders it - the GitHub for Windows client uses it. Maybe you could use that with some javascript?
- jfaucett 14y agoThis is a great new feature. Another thing this reminded me of is how good the github team is at releasing new features, clearly explaining them, and getting them integrated smoothly and across a wide user base. Its very impressive to me since this is rarely done well IMO.
- aw3c2 14y agoFinally! I often want to share small scripts and having to create a repository locally first is much less convenient than just pasting the file online.
- briandoll 14y agoGist is great for that too: https://gist.github.com/ https://gist.github.com/
- ZoFreX 14y agoIt is! And once created, you can push and pull to and from gists just like any git repository :)
- kgabis 14y agoAlso this: https://github.com/ConradIrwin/jist https://github.com/ConradIrwin/jist
- voltagex_ 14y agoI wrote one too! https://github.com/voltagex/python-gist https://github.com/voltagex/python-gist
- RDDavies 14y agoThis is really wonderful. Great for those of us who work from tablets frequently.
- mminer 14y agoAgreed. The ability to edit files from the browser made fixing website typos on-the-go trivial, and this gives even more power to developers whose current machine limits terminal access (Prompt on the iPad + a remote server works wonders, but too often I've had only a colleague's tablet or smartphone to work with).
- Swizec 14y agoThis is awesome for drive-by commits of documentation and such. Marvelous.
- nnnnnn 14y agoNice to see Github releasing more consumer features lately (deleting branches on merge, now creating files, etc). After not seeing a significant update for months, I thought Github forgot about the consumers in their more focused efforts towards enterprise users.
- fishbacon 14y agoThis is awesome for a number of reasons. The biggest is probably that you can now have people helping out without teaching them git. Like people helping with translation, they could just copy the original file and translate it locally, then paste it in to a new file. Way cool.
- ios84dev 14y agoIs it possible to disable this feature so that people can't randomly commit code to a core repo on a team?
- 3825 14y agoI think that you have bigger problems if anyone anywhere has commit privileges to your repository. You must trust your commitors. Am I missing something?
- damncabbage 14y agoHave you tried switching to the fork-and-pull-request model instead of everyone directly committing to the main repo? (It's how many, many open-source projects run, and GitHub has a good write-up of it here: https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests )
- bryanlarsen 14y agoExcellent timing. One of the elements on my TODO list was to add the Github API to my app to create files that I can then have the user edit. Now I can just use a link instead.
- benaiah 14y agoI get the feeling that the various "online IDE" projects may be quickly superseded. If anyone could pull that off, it's Github - just getting Github integration working is hit-and-miss with most of the others. If it could include some live preview functionality for HTML/CSS/JS for mockups and Markdown for writing, it would quickly become vastly useful. Does anyone know what text editor they're using? I assume it's CodeMirror, but I could be wrong.
- USSRLivesOn 14y agoI believe the editor is ACE: https://github.com/blog/905-edit-like-an-ace https://github.com/blog/905-edit-like-an-ace https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace
- CD1212 14y agoI think it is a great decision on where to place the create new file button, it seems obvious when you see it but is such a simple solution. Or is it just me? When I read their tweet I was interested to see how they had integrated it with everything else. Off the top of my head I couldn't think of an ideal place without the whole UX feeling clunky. Well done Github!
- bitsweet 14y agoCould this be the eventual IDE in the cloud so many others have failed at? Start with getting everyone's code in the system, get them viewing code in your system, commenting on commits daily, then "hey while you're here, why not just edit the file in this little editor"...fast forward several more iterations/improvements and then you find yourself never leaving the web editor.
- sergiotapia 14y agoWhat if the internet goes out?
- speiler 14y agoWhat if the power goes out? What if your main development PC goes down? The question is really how often does this happen and how long is it out for. Personally I don't remember the last time my internet was out for more then an hour, and that wasn't even in the last year. Google Docs must have the same problem, how do they mitigate it?
- runevault 14y agoGoogle docs has local storage capabilities, at least with their android versions though I think the web version supports it too.
- vidarh 14y agoThe "local storage" support in Google Docs Android client is still abysmal. I've more than once gotten network related errors when trying to do stuff to a document that I've explicitly marked as "offline". Vastly better than before though - their offline support is very new.
- toyg 14y agoGoogle Drive. I can see the always-on scenario playing out ok for some (web-developers, enterprise folks etc), but I don't see how the hardcore C crowd and their hyper-customized build farms would gain anything from it.
- bryanh 14y agoI bet it is very satisfying to just constantly ship cool new discrete features like this for a product like GitHub.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- recursive 14y agoI'm a little surprised by the unanimous positive response here. Usually any mention of a new GUI for any git functionality gets at least some negative feedback. I count this as progress!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- eslaught 14y agoSorry to be off topic, but does it bug anyone else that the language Github uses for their native client is "Clone in Mac" and "Setup in Windows", as if the name of their client is "Mac" and "Windows", etc. Not only is this confusing, because they're naming the product the same as the OS, but it's also a little insulting because it's almost like saying that the normal command-line Git client doesn't run well on those platforms. I appreciate that they want to draw attention to their native client product, but I really wish they would give it a proper name so that they don't have use the name of the OS instead.
- eagsalazar2 14y agoYES! This drives me totally nuts because people using their clients never become knowledgeable about how git works making those people terrible to collaborate with. The vocabulary they teach them is just totally wrong.
- goldfeld 14y agoI think it's less about promoting their native client as it is about making Github (and Git) less daunting for command-line-evading users. Just so happens their own client is the most user friendly, but it could have been any other, hence not tying the benefit (cloning in the OS with a click) to the implementation.
- rtomayko 14y agoThese buttons are only displayed for users who have installed those tools. We're not using it as advertisement, we're making it convenient for people who have already installed the tool.
- eslaught 14y agoAre you sure about that? I do not have the tool installed (or anything like it, since I use command-line git), but I see the "Clone in Mac" button on every single github repo I view in my browser.
- gurkendoktor 14y agoI can't speak for Windows, but if I click "Clone in Mac", it launches Tower.app. So the label seems apt to me. It's more that the URL protocol that sounds wrong to me (github-mac://??).
- antirez 14y agoGithub is the ultimate no-bullshit company. Any new announce is about some good feature or small improvement that matters: no annoying things to try to protect the company in some odd way, no greedy tactics to make more money in subtle ways. They are completely focused on their users and their product. I wish more tech companies could follow this example.
- terhechte 14y agoOne of their advantages is that they're not dependent upon advertising money
- antirez 14y agoWell, I guess they decided to follow this route. For example github receives a very important amount of traffic targeting accounts that are completely free. Even a very small textual AD adsense-style could mean a lot of money. But they don't do it.
- onedognight 14y agosourceforge.net went with constantly more and more annoying advertising because its customers were advertisers, while github.com makes better and better tools because its customers care about managing their source code.
- timr 14y ago"Github is the ultimate no-bullshit company. Any new announce is about some good feature or small improvement that matters" It's funny that you should say this, because I have pretty much the exact opposite impression. Most of their feature announcements are for dubious changes that don't make my life better (web-based CLI? Stars-vs-followers?), but more to the point, they've left really important things to languish (for example: their code search sucks, and their issue tracking system is just barely usable.) I don't get the sense that GitHub is rowing in the same direction as a company. Their product isn't improving in any consistent way, and for all of the changes that they announce, I'm having a hard time of thinking of the last one that made a positive impact on my life. Certainly, I've never before needed to create a file in github via the web, and I probably never will.
- eagsalazar2 14y agoDon't they then need to be able to support mergetool? I mean editing, which this essentially is, seems to open a whole can of worms. What if someone else creates a README and pushes to the same branch while you are in the process of creating a README?
- 3825 14y agoI assume the push would fail?
- isbadawi 14y agoI just realized you can edit files. Is that new too? Or is it only the file creation that's new?
- Timothee 14y agoOnly file creation is new. I had been wondering where file creation was since they added editing though. This is very welcome.
- spb 14y agoYeah, how long have they had file editing for? I remember seeing it last year, and realizing how quickly I'd hit a wall if I couldn't create new files.
- dia123 14y agoEdit is old - you could do that a while back
- obilgic 14y agoWhat about creating a folder?
- albertzeyer 14y agoHa, I just requested that two weeks ago via their feedback page. They didn't really told me that they were so close to implement that. Now I'm still missing to configure the default settings of the builtin editor.
- lux 14y agoThis is really cool! One tiny feature request: Remember my last settings for tabs/indentation.
- gingerlime 14y agoThat's really cool. Would be even nicer if you can upload any file and attach it to a github issue. That's the only thing keeping us from moving our issue tracker to github (private repository). Unless I missed some sneaky way of doing this?
- rnadna 14y agoNot only is this a great thing (well, everything about github is pretty great) but now I know that the funny icon can be called "breadcrumb".
- roseleafx 14y agoSo this means that when github tells you, "We recommend adding a readme to this repo" you can actually do it right there! It's even a link now. Ah this is so great.