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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

I 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.

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It 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.

I didn't say remove how many days since the last change, that is very useful. The commit message itself? I don't think so.

I guess the repo's you look at don't write very good commit messages?

If you find the number of days since last change useful... why wouldn't you also find it useful to know what was changed in that last change? That's what the commit message tells you, right?

(and the commit message is also the place you click on in the github ui to see the full commit with diff etc)

The 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?

A 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.

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