Astral – Organize Your GitHub Stars with Ease | Hacker News Reader

Astral – Organize Your GitHub Stars with Ease

astralapp.com

145 pointsadamnemecek64 comments

Hi all, creator of Astral here! I just pushed a fix so it doesn't require private repo access. Sorry about that! All previous tokens have been revoked.

If you're wondering why it was there in the first place, either I'm blind and totally missed that auth scope, or it was added sometime after I started working on Astral, and I didn't notice it.

I just spent ~15 minutes adding a bunch of tags and really hope its a good pay-off (as in I remember to come back to this and actually use all the the useful plugins/libraries I starred previously).

I wish tagging was easier and simpler though, like literally just typing, pressing enter, and then tab to go to the next project. Also I turned the auto-language tagging setting on, nothing happened so I tagged a project "Python" then it auto-tagged 38 repos python but when I tagged more repos nothing happened

Edit: Also I wish the tags on the left-side were able to be sorted by # or abc

I wish Astral had the same Delicious tagging feature: its suggest you most used tags for a given link

Don't worry, more powerful tagging and organizing is coming!

+1 and please add some keyboard shortcuts!

Thanks for this. I always wondered why Github doesn't have this by default. This actually solve a problem for me.

Your linear-gradient is broken in .home-section.features, so in Firefox you get white text on white background.

It would be nice if tags could be added faster, e.g., by dragging them onto repos. Adding tags by clicking on a repo, pressing "editing tags" etc., takes a bit too much time for my liking.

Good idea though! I'll be using this.

You can do the reverse, and drag repos onto tags.

This works for me in Chromium, but not in Firefox :(

This could be pretty neat, but I'm hesitant to give an unknown app full write access to my private repositories. Especially when querying public stars can be done with readonly+public access.

I'm not sure many people would need to organize private repos that they've starred. I for one haven't even starred any private repos.

+1 for this. At the very least, it would be nice to have an option to only work with public repositories.

I've cancelled many service signups due to private repo access, too.

+1 on this, I bailed at that. Looks awesome, but I'm not trying it yet.

He is going to waive the access to private repos.

May take a couple of hours until he fixed that.

This is fantastic! I've always felt that when I star something it launches into the void never to be seen again because Github makes discoverability of starred projects so difficult.

Only thing that I feel is missing would be a browser plugin that allowed me to add tags to a project straight from Github. It could be a bit of a slog to log in to Astral every time I want to add a couple of tags to a project that I've just starred.

I also notice that it uses my open-source Angular Classy project! Love seeing examples of Classy being used in the wild :-) (pimp: http://davej.github.io/angular-classy/)

Angular Classy rocks, thanks! I definitely am hoping to eventually build browser extensions for Chrome and Safari. (I need an intern)

This app looks amazing, and it's pretty much what I've wished I had for a long time... but I have no intention of trying it out while it's asking for read/write access to all my repos.

Please make the permissions more sensible.

Also, what are your plans for offering data interaction? I would love to be able to poll categorical data from your site so I can further extend my star information.

I stole it from this /r/webdev thread https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2mwlhd/astral_organ... so direct your feedback that way.

Unfortunately I believe the r/w access is a limitation of github right now, so there is no way around this as of yet.

Only if you want to be able to unstar from the app, with the app doing it via the API. I'd much rather give it read-only public access and not be able to unstar from it.

It would be nice to at least have the option of not providing access to public repos. Actually, I suspect most people wouldn't mind not being able to manage private starred repos so perhaps all it takes is a simple change of the permissions being asked for.

I understand there are some R/W issues with the GH permission model, but I don't think there's any problems with separating access to public and private repos.

Hi all, creator here (again). I've created a GitHub repo that you can file feature requests and bug reports in. I'm struggling to keep up with HN, Reddit, and email. https://github.com/syropian/astral-issues

What's the chance this will be open source?

This is really useful, and very nicely presented (having a secondary service is a faff, but unless GH integrates something similar, this looks the best solution I've seen). Just a few things I found as I tried to make a dent on my starred repos, apologies if I've just completely missed some functionality:

- The 'Edit Tags' form stay open when you switch repo.

- Switching to the next repo doesn't scroll the frame back to the top, which is a little annoying.

- Some minimal form of initial organisation (eg just automatically adding the language) would be good.

- It would be helpful if the 'tags' textbox autofocussed when 'edit tags' is clicked, so that typing could begin immediately.

- Following on from that, binding some keyboard shortcuts, allowing something [tab?] to save the tags and move onto the next one, would reduce the tedium of mass adding/updating.

- Some method of ordering the tags (ie alphabetically) would be nice, rather than just the order they were added - I don't find search to be that useful compared to simply scanning the list.

- Some method of keying to the next repo would be nice

Thanks for the feedback! Keyboard accessibility and more robust tagging/organizing is my highest priority right now, besides like, making sure my servers don't explode. ★

This is brilliant. Just one thing missing...

... a chrome extension to show tags on the GitHub page.

Very nicely done, bookmarked!

My imagination would have called it Constellations to refer as stars identified and grouped by tags :p but Astral is pretty cool and shorter =D

Great, I too wished I had time to create this at some point :)

Thank you for making it!

Maybe look into making the tag adding easier when you can. For example:

1. click on the repo

2. click on 'Edit tags'

it would be good if the focus immediately switched to the tag edit box without having to click on it to edit it

Also, README's not in the 'default' markdown mode don't render so well. For example if the README is in org-mode...

Wow, this is great (for non-mobile). I just did a thing a few weeks ago that adds your GitHub started repos to Wunderlist with their description and homepage to make searching / sorting / remembering them easier: https://github.com/ip2k/wunder-star

Really rough, but it works for me (on a crontab)

Although it's made for a desktop, it actually looks fine on a small device in landscape mode. I'm using an iPhone 5S and it's just wide enough to view the content fine. https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#A3GTI3fvKXgL9

I have always been wondering why github hasn't provided anything like this, given than there have been so many new awesome open source projects worth starring keep emerging from time to time...

At the moment I also wondering, what if github integrates similar functionalities? How services like this compete at all?

It'd be a lot more valuable if it offered some initial organization (e.g. by primary language, or by author). Otherwise I'm left with several hundred stars to categorize.

The interface is gorgeous, but doesn't really do much. Also somewhat surprised to see it's not on Github its self.

Also, I'm generally ok with tags that other people created for the same repository. Not sure why I would want to do all this busy work.

I am totally sold, because my github repos are numerous and I'd love to tag them all. But the tagging feature needs a cancel button, not just save.

And drag and drop of the tags doesn't work, dragging them to the right on the green background only scrolls it sideways.

This is pretty nice. Great job. Drag-n-drop to tag is nice.

Some feature requests:

- Keyboard shortcuts, especially for tagging.

- Alternate layout that supports narrow window widths, much like email clients (Mail.app).

- Resizable / collapsible sidebar.

- Sortable tags list.

Nice! Does anyone know of something similar that's open source / outputs plain HTML+JS you can put up on your website? Would be neat to share my github starred repos without requiring someone to get an account somewhere to see them.

Yes, kind of. I just recently wanted this and found https://github.com/skyjia/repogen

It's written in Go and outputs markdown, which you could convert to html. I just made a repo of the output. I've starred a lot of repos and one long list makes it easier for me to search and browse them.

I'm getting stuck on the sign in page. After authorizing the app with Github, there's a black box that appears and the Sign In button shows up again.

Edit: Looks like the server is 500ing, according to the Javascript console.

Sweet! Having 500+ starred repos, I wanted to build this myself to help with organization.

It would be nice if tag names didn't have min. length. I can't tag stuff with "ui", "d3" etc.

Wow! That is great. Exactly what i was missing. Design is also really nice. Are you planning on building it as a responsive site?

Edit: Definitely found it's way to my bookmarks bar.

Really really nice! Found a place in my bookmarks folder for it.

One thing - it does not seem to allow for 2 letter tags - for e.g. I tried d3 for a couple of my repos and no cigar :(

It would be awesome if it showed popular tags for a repo rather than having to manually tag each one. Maybe it does have that feature and i just star obscure repos

Edit: Disregard this, appears something funky is going on with SSL on my work's network

Looks like it's down for now - Disappointing, looks promising.

Seems up for me.

I'm pretty sure my roommate has starred the most Repos on GitHub, currently at over 3,000. I'll have to show him this.

Astral seems to have handled my stars without any noticeable issues, so I'm sure it'll do fine with his. ;)

http://i.imgur.com/JjPJV6P.png

°__°

I was really hoping someone would come forward. I'm at 200 and think I star too much. Anyways I had to take a screenshot if only for the rounded numbers.

https://i.imgur.com/hrHKmNv.png

When I try to drag off the side, it's scrolling sideways and kind of breaking the UI. I'm using Chrome on Windows.

nice work, few suggestions:

* I created two tags with the same name 'Python' accidentally and I can't delete neither of them

* when adding tag to a repo, it would be nice to have a "Everyone else have tagged xxxx" helper, so I can add common tags with one click

just wrote in twitter (https://twitter.com/0xAX/status/533858562863165440) that github must have tags for stars some days ago and i see this project. Thank you, very useful.

Very well designed. However what advantage does this have over browser bookmarks/tags?

Great job on the naming :)

This is amazing! I'm surprised this didn't exist beforehand

Is it possible to tag also "watched" repos?

Great job! Github should integrate this!

Feature request ..

Automatically add tag , based on repo description and using natural language processing

Thanks for choking my browser.

Using firefox? It's impossible to use, or even just scroll. Works in Chrome though. I suppose it is the star animations at the top of the page that bring firefox to its knees.

Ya, think I gotta kill that canvas animation on Firefox. :(

Yes, please do. It's really bogging down Firefox. It's much better using Chrome.

Really? This is where we are as humans?

The fact that I was interested enough to click in the link and consider getting an account a minute ago now seems repulsive to me. What the hell am I doing?

Anyway, this seems to be a good service. I like organizing things, I think it is a good thing to do, but with the luck of God I did not sign up when I clicked the link, and I hope I'll never.

Yes. We are truly lost as a species. Not only are we creating banal organizational apps, but we're also taking the time to try to make the author feel bad by decrying its lack of higher purpose in a HN comment.

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