Refined GitHub
GitHub truly revolutionized open source. I’m hugely thankful for its existence. Early on they innovated, moved fast, delighted us regularly. Lately though, it feels like progress has stagnated, and focus is mainly on the Enterprise side. Totally understandable from a business perspective, but a bit disappointing as a power-user. The experience still leaves a lot to be desired.
One day I decided to take matters into my own hands. Turns out there’s a lot that can be done with just some CSS overrides and JavaScript. And so was the refined-github browser extension born. The extension fixes a bunch of minor annoyances, cleans up the interface, and adds some nifty features. Have you ever been annoyed by not being able to click the branch names in a pull request? Think the news feed is too noisy? Or maybe you wanted to click that issue reference in the title of a pull request? Then you will definitely enjoy this extension.
Now, one month later, the reception has been overwhelmingly positive with more than 1000 active users. It’s clear I’m not alone in wanting a better GitHub experience. Haralan Dobrev, Paul Molluzzo, and I, are working hard on more awesomeness. If there’s something that bothers you when using GitHub or maybe there’s this one feature you always wanted, open an issue, or even better, a pull request!
The extension is currently available for Chrome and Safari (external), and I welcome an external Firefox port.
My end goal and hope is that GitHub will notice and implement some of these improvements. I would encourage emailing GitHub support about it.
