Welcome to a New Gist
github.com
github.com
I use gists all day every day: it's where I dump and share pieces of reusable code. It's always been a huge pain to search for something you know you gisted, but can no longer find without browsing through 20 pages of 3-line excerpts. Search makes this a million times better.
The new code editor is also pretty sweet!
--- Somewhat OT:
I find that github has always had poor to okay search capabilities.
For example, have you ever tried to search for a repo name, only to find 1000 forks? wat. Ever tried to search issues for a specific issue, only to find no results, removing a word or two to get a less accurate search.
Search for me is about discoverability. And github is for developers for the most part.
As a developer I want discoverability for code! I want regex features (like in google code search), better matches. Ways to compress my search results down. Search tags code:'if Awesome()'.
I just feel they could be doing so much better in this area.
* it is (surprisingly?) case sensitive * it only searches titles, not file contents * the UI feels disconnected from the main gist area, making it unclear whether its a search of all Gists (like the previous version) or a personal search.
Fortunately, this update indicates they're paying attention to a much-used part of their product that was starting to feel neglected. At their pace of improvement I can't see these holes remaining for too long.
Now, hope they add back the ability to be notified when there's a comment on your gist (which Gisted supports)!
In my opinion: In a couple of years we will not use Emacs or Visual Studio or anything like that: Most of programming will be done socially in Github via small changes directly from the website, from hundreds of people... it'd simplify the process of collaborative programming a lot.
> Most of programming will be done socially [...] via
> small changes [...] from hundreds of people
Of course, I'd never leave Emacs for Github when creating software from scratch or doing anything big.
A couple of decades, maybe.
Even then I disagree, but it's at least plausible.
Years though? I think you're over estimating how quickly this could possible happen.
What a nightmare.
I prefer very small teams whose members each have particular responsibilities so they're not stepping on each other, testing code before pushing out to the public.
As someone who's always worked alone, I also find your opinion adorable, and will code socially when someone manages to hack their way into my ultra secure coding vault. Which I admittedly let people into for pairing. Sometimes.
Collaborative doesn't necessarily mean synchronous. We learned this building the real time building system in second life. Sometimes you just want to sit in your corner and know no one else is gonna come in, and not having that ability cuts off a huge portion of people who just don't work well in that circumstance. It's awesome to work offline, alone.
(Christmas spirit, maybe?)
Two of my favorite gist frontends, broken :(
I'm also having an issue with Plunker as legacy templates are pulled from Gist and are currently broken.
Fortunately, I implemented a cache layer on top of GitHub's API recently, so many examples are working on http://bl.ocks.org. But only those that are lucky enough not to get a connection timeout. Hopefully the API will be back up soon!
Clicking "discover" at gist.github.com is unenlightening.
What's the reasoning for this? I imagine if you don't have a blog of any kind it fills in, but it seems a odd place to publish lengthy essays.
Add Disqus and you've got a neat little product.
- https://gist.github.com/1173880: A chunk of code to get information about running processes.
- https://gist.github.com/1082933: A little JavaScript function to decode quoted-printable encoding
- https://gist.github.com/842476: A chunk of code that blocks (I wrote it for a startup daemon) until the OS’s network stack is ready.
- https://gist.github.com/c980470f5ef244c4b4d3: My and a friend’s solution to the last level of Stripe’s CTF (may not be the final version)
- https://gist.github.com/2586751: A patch against a JSON library that to make it handle escapes in a spec-compliant way.
…Some of them are useful as-is, others are useful as reminders of how I dealt with a particular problem in case I run into it again.
- lecture notes
- collection of resources
- snippets of code (for myself or remote teammates)
- todo lists
- tutoring
- and more...
gist.github was way behind the rest of Github for a long time. It's good to see they've finally released this because they've no doubt been working on it for a while.
I do wish there was a true "private" gist, though, for easily preventing people I don't specify from seeing it. I'd love to be able to use it to trade code examples for work, but there's nothing to prevent someone from accidentally pasting the url into the wrong irc window and showing the world our internals.
[1] https://gist.github.com/auth/failure?message=timeout&ori...
I just had a need to do this with a bit of documentation I was writing. Ended up modifying the DOM to show/hide what I wanted and allow the screen stylesheet to be used in printing (to PDF).
I just wish that the advertising when you embed into another website was a bit more subtle. Right now it's a full line of text "This Gist brought to you by GitHub" that is tagged onto the bottom of every embed. If your blog post has a lot of these, especially short ones, it can quickly become intrusive.
Still wishing I could get Gist pull requests or merge forks of my Gist from the UI.
Now for my shameless plug:
If you use Gist as a means to share web-related snippets, you might be amazed by the Plunker editor (http://plnkr.co/edit/). It was inspired by Gist, but will let you actually 'run' your code (and will do some other cool stuff like real-time collaboration, previewing and linting). This tool has become quite popular in the AngularJS community and I hope to see more groups get on board in the future!
http://plnkr.co/edit/gist:1136236?p=preview is a snippet by the unbelievable Mike Bostock pulled directly from Gist.
I want to see Gist evolve into a Dribbble/Behance gallery but for showing off code snippets of value instead of images. We can already convey advanced ideas simply in few lines. To provide a little more story behind our contribution and share it in a small network could really build a nice broad community whose infrastructure has been laid already.
I've really been loving all of these Github updates the past year, they've been killing it and it's good to see they've finally given Gist some love.
I don't see a way to post gists directly from an editor like Sublime, but I'll be all over that when I find it.
Related discussion: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11456558/markdown-not-ren...
Having a pasteboard type gist makes me wonder things like,
- Can a gist have multiple files in it?
- What is a file inside a gist named?
- Can I convert a gist to a normal project?
- Can I convert a normal project to a gist?
When I'm learning a new framework / lib / language I love to look at other people's gists for good (and bad!) working examples. That said, I would LOVE the ability to sort search results by date / number of comments / forks etc.
A collection would just be a category of gists in a category like "Idiomatic Python examples", "Django snippets", and so on.
I think people use gists in a fundamentally different way (I do), and I guess you could argue that gists are mainly for viewing and sharing whereas repos are for cloning/downloads.
Think Collections as Pinterest boards for code, perhaps. :)
Gists could be social, whereas repos are more self-serving and utilitarian in the sense of scratching an itch. Or at least they could be.
Now it's still not fixed in my case. What happened to github?
As long as whatever you're editing is supported by the editor, that leaves little to be desired.
Nice work.