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- redbad 13y agoCool. Seems like their head is in the right place: designing for productivity and usability. Kudos.
- sktrdie 13y agoI 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!
- obviouslygreen 13y agoI guess that's a matter of opinion... they're changing things, and whether that qualifies as improvement is, in most cases, likely to end up being pretty subjective (unless the change is exactly limited to something like "our pages now all render twice as fast!"). And really... do we need to make everything about something Jobs said? The only part I'd agree with here is that "foolish" might apply if they drop the ball by making the UI less usable/intuitive, in which case "stay foolish" is horrible advice and will negatively effect a whole lot of users.
- eightyone 13y agoI 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 13y agoYeah 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 =)
- julien_c 13y agoI 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.
- alberth 13y agoFor 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-d714-11e2-81de-ff48d7209bf4.jpg https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1354/660756/cc8cad9c-d714-... EDIT: typo
- cpeterso 13y agoThank you! I was looking for this in the article itself. Now I see that the redesign looks like a good step forward.
- stephth 13y agoThe 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 13y agoThat 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.
- reledi 13y agoAnyone know what the green button does? edit: It's for pull requests. When you enable the new design, you get a quick explanation of the green button and where the clone URL has moved to. So far I'm really liking the new design!
- ericras 13y ago>> 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.
- obviouslygreen 13y agoYep; GMail adopting mystery meat navigation was a real step back, and it's still mildly irritating to use quite a while later. Hopefully this trend, if that's what it is, runs its course before it spreads much farther.
- ianterrell 13y agoI have the same concern. I find it's even more troublesome with the flat/simplistic design aesthetic: it just takes way longer for my brain to differentiate one light-gray-on-white abstract symbol from another than it does to pattern match word shapes. I've even turned on whatever Gmail lab puts the words back into the buttons. That said, Github looks to be mitigating this issue by having full text on the root screen for the repo. Compare the sidebar here: https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1354/660756/cc8cad9c-d714-11e2-81de-ff48d7209bf4.jpg https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1354/660756/cc8cad9c-d714-... and here: https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1354/660769/fe4a1a0e-d714-11e2-851b-df73f3489dae.jpg https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1354/660769/fe4a1a0e-d714-... Maybe that will train my brain with positional data a little better than Gmail managed to.
- sandyarmstrong 13y ago> That said, Github looks to be mitigating this issue by having full text on the root screen for the repo Oh, that's a great point. It pretty much solves my main concerns.
- rubiii 13y agothe menu only includes a few distinctive icons. i'm sure you will remember their order and looks over time.
- gkop 13y agoThe 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.
- danbmil99 13y agoCall 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 13y agoGitHub 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 13y agoFair 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.
- omegote 13y agoI 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 13y agoThe 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 13y agoThe CSS for the images in the post already adds some padding and a 1px border, so there you have your separation.
- steveklabnik 13y agoWith many screenshot tools there's a 'capture this window' option, which makes it much more easy to grab the output of a window than choosing 'select a box' and dragging a square over the entire window minus the chrome. That said, it doesn't look like they did that here...
- rpicard 13y agoTake a look at your comment history. There is so much unnecessary hostility!
- omegote 13y agoI've got balls of steel.
- sauravc 13y agoIt 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 13y ago> 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-d715-11e2-8f85-1bf113741786.jpg https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/1354/660780/2e217312-d715-...
- sauravc 13y agoMy 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.
- snowwrestler 13y agoThe new layout doesn't seem like a very big change, but if the speed claims are correct that would be a big improvement.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- justinjlynn 13y agoWhen in a repository, shift-clicking on a file link no longer opens the link in a new window. Oops.
- steveklabnik 13y agoIsn't that control-click, not shift-click?
- graywh 13y agoctrl-click to open in a background tab works for me, but shift-click to open in a new window does not
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- spankalee 13y agoThis 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 13y agoSo far I've been happy with using pull requests for that.
- spankalee 13y agoI just can't review without side-by-side diffs. The res of GitHub is so wonderful, I wish they'd add it.
- zsombor 13y agoCheck out https://www.tixef.com https://www.tixef.com, it has side-by-side diffs with comments, language aware diffs, cross referenced source code and other goodies. There is two click quick demo link in the toolbar.
- aroemers 13y agoBitbucket does have side-by-side diffs. Simple, but effective.
- bcuccioli 13y agoAnother great tool (disclaimer: I've contributed a bit) is Phabricator (http://phabricator.com http://phabricator.com).
- Stratoscope 13y agoI just hope they get rid of the side-scrolling when navigating code. It really bothers my eyes.
- zsombor 13y agoTixef.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]
- Stratoscope 13y agoAnd no side scrolling! :-) I will check it out.
- mh- 13y ago(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 13y agoTo 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.
- purephase 13y agoI'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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bhauer 13y agoI 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 13y agoI noticed the missing animation, too. Now I feel suddenly nostalgic about it.
- wyck 13y agoSo 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 13y agoClick it! This was in the old design, just not as prominent
- dfc 13y agoIt 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.
- niutech 13y agoI prefer the good old top menu rather than the new one on the right side.
- chintan 13y agoJust 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.
- technoweenie 13y agoThe preferred URL is the one in the browser address bar: "https://github.com/{owner}/{repo}" https://github.com/{owner}/{repo}". Works great for pushing and pulling.
- dsirijus 13y agoYeh, but the convenience of it here is that you may freely browse that repo (and change URL in the address bar), and still have the access to the repo URL.
- jeremymcanally 13y agoThe clone URL was never accessible from deeper pages.
- Legion 13y agoAgreed. I use Bitbucket every day, and while it's far short of 30 seconds, I do find it takes a second or two of extra scanning to notice where the repo URL is. And it's essentially on the top right, not aggressively out of the way. Now, Github's pushing it even further out of view than Bitbucket's location.
- transfire 13y agoCan'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.
- shardling 13y agoHmm, 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!
- simonz05 13y agoI think their goal is the right; to reduce the vertical space usage at the top of the page before the "content". They did however remove some of the useful tabs and keep the least useful. Programming language stats and project description & project URL seems less important to me than the "code, issues, pull request etc" tabs.
- drone 13y agoAgreed. I've often presumed that stats (esp. language and commit counts, etc.) were part of the "social" aspect of GitHub, but not otherwise useful to me in any meaningful way most of the time. I think the sidebars are a step back for me. I preferred some useful content at the top, now having it on a sidebar just moves that content to the right side, away from my focus. One positive thing about the change is that "network" and "graphs" are now not co-mingled with main workflow items like Issues and Pull Requests.
- DanielRibeiro 13y agoMy 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.
- olalonde 13y agoI 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.
- monkmartinez 13y agosearch all of github is broken anyway. Half of my projects couldn't run with the language they choose to label it with. Unless you wade into the src, you have no idea what the repo actually is.
- Gazler 13y agoYeah, 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 13y agoGood idea, I just wrote a Chrome extension: https://github.com/olalonde/gh-globalsearch https://github.com/olalonde/gh-globalsearch
- Oompa 13y agoThe bar is context sensitive. Search from your newsfeed, and it searches all of GitHub. If you're looking at a repo, you by default search that repo.
- olalonde 13y agoI know how it works, I just don't think it should work that way. I bet 95%+ searches on Github are Github-wide, not repository specific. Why not make the most common use case the default? Plus, why would a top navigation bar be context sensitive?
- mattmanser 13y agoI 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.
- simonz05 13y agoThe code browser is in my opinion one of the most useful features of github. Commit history and blame combined with the "unnecessary noise" you describes makes it very easy for me to find out the last time I touched some line or file and what changed. Why do you really care about the file size and amount of files btw?
- mattmanser 13y agoA lot of files in C# (and I'd imagine Java) just contain interfaces because it's so 'cheap' to make these in IDEs and that's the programming style. So often you're looking for the files which contain the majority of the code and you're just having to open random files trying to find it. How big the file is shows roughly how many LOC it contains. This is actually becoming more common in javascript as well as more people unbundle their code, it'd be useful seeing if the file you're about to open is meat or chaff. I'm fine with showing the last commit time, that is useful information, the comment itself though is invariably noise to everyone but the committer or team.
- jrochkind1 13y agoIt 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.
- philfreo 13y agoI 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 13y agoI'd really like to see the navigation be part of the name. It makes sense.
- alberth 13y agoI'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.
- MattRix 13y agoJust started using it and like it SO MUCH better. Everything feels much cleaner and easier to absorb at a glance. Love it!
- zachgersh 13y agoNo 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.
- nfm 13y agoA 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.
- targusman 13y agoI prefer bit bucket but my job makes use GitHub.
- minikomi 13y agoFirst impressions and all that but .. Wow, that language bar is pretty jarring - especially when the main language is Javascript (bright red).
- mrinterweb 13y agoI 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 13y agoThis 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.
- ing33k 13y agowill take some time to get used to it..
- apathetic 13y agoIs there any way to revert to the old one?
- rubyn00bie 13y agoI 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.
- jontro 13y agoThe ability to not switch branches from the commits view is frustrating. I really want to switch back to the old look.
- jamesbrennan 13y agoI just opted into the new design and I can attest that it is _very_ responsive and browsing code is noticeably quicker than before.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Lavir1 13y agoI am tired of yet another GUI change which introduces nothing but loss of time for getting accustomed to the new "features"!
- c-oreills 13y agoThere 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. =/
- ksec 13y agoDoubled Down on Pjax and Caching, i wonder if they are using Rails 4.0 already.
- targusman 13y agoThis update is driving me crazy.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sudhirj 13y agoThink 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.
- tagliala 13y agoI 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 :(