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> Show file sizes

Those are at the top of the display of file contents. However, they aren't in the tree view, as you've stated. Unfortunately, this is hard because I don't believe Git stores this info in their index of files, which is what is used to generate the tree view. It might be infeasible to gather that data for the tree view.

> Show real dates instead of the vaguely rounded off "how long ago".

If you hover over any relative date, the real date is shown. It's on the title attribute for any relative date.

> Use a readable font on mobile.

The have Consolas and "Liberation Mono" on the font stack, but those probably aren't on your phone. They are limited in font selection because they have switched to native fonts. This avoids the download of some giant font file that contains all the possible glyphs (which is needed on a site like GitHub's). Unfortunately, the monospace options on mobile are pretty limited: http://iosfonts.com/

> Show a directory tree on the left.

Best tip I can offer is to type `t` to search by file name. Works great and has partial matching support, which makes it really quick to navigate to certain key files.

The tree doesn't tell you when the blob was last modified either. If they can show last modified time (and commit message), showing file size is surely even easier.

Size = 0 is a common case, useful to highlight, and (I think) should have a common hash value. __init__.py files are a great place to look if they're not empty, but most are.

Just had to test what the other keys did.

What i found:

t = search file

j/k = move down/down (selected file)

w = select branch

s = focus search field

y = expands url

Anyone know any more?

EDIT: Found this https://help.github.com/articles/using-keyboard-shortcuts/

Press ? on any page.

Would _love_if that became standard practice.

It kinda is. Across most Google products it is (gmail, music, calendar, etc). Most hotkey JS libraries I've seen also use ? as the default for seeing all of the bound hotkeys, so anyone who uses a library should have it by default too. It's always the first thing I try on a website.

Interesting. Thanks.

OHHHH! It works on gitlab as well!

That's incredible.

Oh my, this just led to me finding https://github.com/issues.

I'm guessing I should be slightly embarrassed to have not realised that existed - was it there before they changed the top bar to black a few days ago? (I now see that there's a link to it from said bar...)

> Unfortunately, this is hard because I don't believe Git stores this info in their index of files,

I don't know if they keep a work tree on the server side, but if they did, then it would be trivial to store the file size as determined from the file on disk and display it on the front-end regardless of the type of view. Alternatively, they could determine the size from the blob associated with the file in the object store.

> keep a work tree on the server side

That's complicated by the fact you could be viewing any commit, not just HEAD of master.

Presumably the branch/tag/commit that's currently chosen is stored in the session. You can retrieve the size of a blob by running

    git cat-file -s commit:path/to/file

and the tree object has a listing of the blobs and trees it references. I would think they could do this and store the results when a particular commit is chosen from the drop-down menu on the web page.

Just because you can get it, it doesn't mean that this is efficient and fast enough to do when you are browsing through the directories. Now imagine the slowness, since caching this doesn't even make remotely sense for many repos.

> Just because you can get it, it doesn't mean that this is efficient and fast enough to do when you are browsing through the directories.

It's already doing this for the last time modified value it retrieves or calculates for each file and directory as I'm browsing through the repo. That requires determining which commit last changed each file and in the case of directories, which commit most recently changed one of the files within the directory.

The file sizes, on the other hand, are available by determining which blob is associated with the file. That file to blob mapping available by recursing through the trees associated with the commit that's currently selected. This does not require iterating through multiple commits, unlike the former case, and it shouldn't be any more complex.

It's pretty cheap to get the file size with decompressing the whole blob. You can decompress just the first hundred of so bytes of the .git blob object, which starts with "blob {size}\x00". For example, using Python:

   >>> import zlib
   >>> f = open('.git/objects/00/331d4c2e12984f70df4a3dd3bc7296825faab0', 'rb')
   >>> zlib.decompressobj().decompress(f.read(100))
   b'blob 11708\x00...'

So that particular file is 11708 bytes. It still requires an open and read operation. But they could cache that on a per-file or per-tree basis, so it's very doable.

At least until you try to open up https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/tree/master/Formul... :)

I actually prefer the "time since" method. Don't have to do date maths in your head to see how active the repo/file is.

> Show a directory tree on the left.

FYI there's a Chrome extension for that

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/octotree/bkhaagjah...

It can be a bit of a faff to set up with private repos, but it's a fantastic tool, well worth trying out if you want directory-tree navigation in GitHub.

I'd be really happy if they parsed the code and indexed definitions vs usage in search. A lot of times when I'm digging through a project I'll find a function and want to look up the definition. Ok, try searching for the type and function name, nothing, it must be type, a line break, then the function name. A lot of times I end up clicking through pages of search results trying to find something that is a little elusive. It would be awesome if they did it like IDEs and you could filter searches by usage or definitions (go to declaration sort of thing). Given the number of languages they would have to implement that over, I don't think it will happen, but it would be cool.

> Fix the display for code that indents with tabs. It still defaults to 8 columns, which hardly anyone (with a few notable exceptions) likes

I still think GH's insistence on 8-space tabs is part of a secret conspiracy campaign to get people to stop using tabs. It always looks bad when you look at tabbed source code in there, so the easier way to avoid it is to start using spaces instead.

> Fix the display for code that indents with tabs.

Hidden feature: you can actually add ?ts=2 (or 4) to the URL. It would be nice to be able to configure it, though.

You can use a simple Stylish rule to force it to your preferred indentation:

https://userstyles.org/styles/70979/github-better-sized-tabs...

This is what I do, and now GitHub styles match my editor styles. It makes my brain tranquil.

> disabled pinch zoom

Can anyone explain to me why this is even a feature?

Why did the powers that be decide that web sites should be able to prevent pinch zooming? Why do mobile browsers not provide the option to disable this bug?

I agree, it is a real PITA when using <7" phones.

> Why do mobile browsers not provide the option to disable this bug?

In Firefox, you can set browser.ui.zoom.force-user-scalable to true.

Unfortunately, if have JavaScript enabled, some pages are still able to disable the zoom.

What I want most is "jump to definition". Maybe not as full fledged as the true IDE, but just ctags like behavior is immensely helpful.

The Sourcegraph Chrome extension provides this for Python, JavaScript and a few other languages I think.

I known. But their language support is very limited.

I've made codesearch.xyz with that purpose. It lets you enter repo URL and then it lets you search and browse the code.

> Show a directory tree on the left

The OctoTree extension is great for this (all browsers, and works for both Github and Gitlab)

> Show file sizes

https://github.com/harshjv/github-repo-size

> GitHub Plus [1][2] does that and more.

Features

1. Displays repo size.

2. Displays each file size in every active branch (not applicable for folder / symlink).

3. Show download link for each individual file (not applicable for folder / symlink).

4. Copy file's contents directly to Clipboard (just won't work for markdown files).

5. Download file while viewing it's contents.

[1] https://github.com/softvar/github-plus

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/github-plus/anlikc...

> • Fix the display for code that indents with tabs. It still defaults to 8 columns

God made the ASR-33 with 8-column tabs for a reason. ;-)

As for style, it is relatively easy to make a browser plugin that overrides the default styles of a site. While working for Canonical, I did one for Launchpad:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/launchpad-tweaks/p...

To me the real killer is that the code formatter is too slow on mobile, with no way (AFAIK) of opting out.

"Show a directory tree on the left"

if you use Chrome, try out Octotree

Hovering over any time on GitHub shows the absolute time.

That's as bad for compairing as giving file sizes in bytes, kilobytes and megabytes in the same listing.