Welcome to a New Gist

https://github.com/blog/1276-welcome-to-a-new-gist

by SeoxyS • 14 years ago

287 90 14 years ago

SeoxyS2• 14 years ago

My favorite new feature: you can finally search through your own gists!

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!

1qaz2wsx3edc• 14 years ago

I like the update to gists.

--- 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.

holman• 14 years ago

Gist is our first entry into Better Search. With the amount of code we index (and the unique problems of searching source code as opposed to prose), it's not something we can change overnight.

ryandaigle• 14 years ago

The lack of search is the main reason I created http://gistedapp.herokuapp.com. Unfortunately I still find their search lacking in a few fundamental ways:

* 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)!

avolcano2• 14 years ago

Here's the blog post about the redesign: https://github.com/blog/1276-welcome-to-a-new-gist

rhizome3• 14 years ago

Isn't that what this post is linked to?

skeletonjelly• 14 years ago

Maybe somebody changed the link?

pauletienney• 14 years ago

Github has been on fire for one week.

chadscira• 14 years ago

I was hoping that they would finally add the ability to put a gist in a folder or tag one :(

dbaupp2• 14 years ago

GitHub seems to be in the midst of a spree of new non-trivial features: in the past week or so, there have been 7 blog posts, every one introducing something new!

(Christmas spirit, maybe?)

technoweenie2• 14 years ago

Shipping spirit :) It's definitely nothing planned on our part. We just happened to wrap up some stuff around the same time.

Dylanlacey• 14 years ago

Tidings of serendipitous code, eh? Feliz Navidad!

misnome• 14 years ago

I'm hoping (or at least correlating in my mind) that this has something to do with them stepping up their game in response to Bitbucket's overhaul.

artursapek2• 14 years ago

I love "Secret Gist" vs. "Public Gist"

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.

fishtoaster• 14 years ago

I think "Secret Gist" is just a renaming of "Private Gist" which has existed for a while: only people with the url will see it. It's a better and more accurate name, for sure.

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.

artursapek2• 14 years ago

I know it's a rename. That's a cool idea. Sort of the way Google Docs handles it by letting you specify emails that can view your document.

shazow• 14 years ago

Great improvements, love the search.

Still wishing I could get Gist pull requests or merge forks of my Gist from the UI.

mehulkar• 14 years ago

I know HN doesn't believe in a comment where an upvote will suffice, but the first thing I searched this thread was for "pull request" and by golly, I think they would be a great addition also.

voltagex_2• 14 years ago

And a one button gist-to-github repo.

dysoco2• 14 years ago

Github is slowly turning into an IDE for the web.

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.

pyre• 14 years ago

  >  Most of programming will be done socially [...] via
  > small changes [...] from hundreds of people

This seems a little extreme. I'd venture that right now 'most of programming' is private code, or small side projects/toy code (i.e. single-developer projects).

dbaupp2• 14 years ago

I'd think that the total SLOC in side/single-developer projects is miniscule compared to the total SLOC in social projects (e.g. Linux, GCC, Emacs, etc.), and even smaller compared to the SLOC in private/corporate code-bases.

dysoco2• 14 years ago

I was specifically talking about opensource projects like Linux or Rails: Where most of commits nowadays are small bug fixes.

Of course, I'd never leave Emacs for Github when creating software from scratch or doing anything big.

rhizome3• 14 years ago

That would violate Separation of Concerns :)

encoderer• 14 years ago

Define "a couple of years."

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.

jamesbritt2• 14 years ago

Most of programming will be done socially in Github via small changes directly from the website, from hundreds of people

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.

MBlume• 14 years ago

Yes, this. Trying to do real work on shared code is painful. Ownership is important.

qdot76367• 14 years ago

As someone who's been on emacs the better part of a decade now, I find your opinion adorable and invite you to wrestle my editor/ide/im client/mail client/friend/lover from my cold, dead, RSI'd fingers.

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.

kibwen• 14 years ago

Happy to see, Gist has been lagging behind for a while now. And my Gist usage has exploded since installing this Vim plugin:

https://github.com/mattn/gist-vim

SeoxyS2• 14 years ago

I love you. You just made my day by posting this link!

fbuilesv• 14 years ago

And in case you're an Emacs user, here's an equivalent: https://github.com/defunkt/gist.el :)

JasonFruit• 14 years ago

Available via marmalade as well.

ment4list• 14 years ago

For Sublime Text 2: https://github.com/condemil/Gist :)

GotNothing• 14 years ago

Awesome... Thanks!

dergachev• 14 years ago

I love these guys! Yesterday I came across an annoying bug related to embedded gists and markdown files, and this fixes it.

kmfrk3• 14 years ago

I hope we get to see Collections for gists, because I am finding them really unmanageable otherwise, and there is little incentive for people to browse through them otherwise.

johns• 14 years ago

Wouldn't that be a GitHub repository?

kmfrk3• 14 years ago

No. Repo lists are cluttered enough as it is. :)

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.

farslan2• 14 years ago

Same here. I have lots of snippets (in JS, Python, Go,etc..). Managing them is a pain. Also I have some that I use for my blog examples however executing them alone doesnt do anything. It would be great if I could organize them.

kmfrk3• 14 years ago

Oh yeah, right. I forget the concept of using gists in blog posts, but I guess it's because I quit that thought because of how much of a mess it leaves behind in your gist list.

kevingadd2• 14 years ago

This broke embedding single files from gists :( That's what I get for using Gist in blog posts and websites, I guess.

desbest• 14 years ago

It was broke for me with the old Gist system. They only let me hotlink a .css file like 5 times.

kevingadd2• 14 years ago

I don't mean using gists as raw files. I mean embedding gists, using the javascript embed link they give you on the gist site.

technoweenie2• 14 years ago

Sorry about that. We'll get a fix out there ASAP.

davidwparker• 14 years ago

Agreed- I've used gists heavily in my blog posts and they look pretty terrible right now. I sent feedback to Github via Twitter. Hopefully they'll fix it quickly.

kingfishr• 14 years ago

Oh shoot:

http://gist.io/3135754

http://bl.ocks.org/1353700

Two of my favorite gist frontends, broken :(

gbadman4• 14 years ago

It seems like the Gist component of the API is either having a hard time or no longer works with JSONP.

I'm also having an issue with Plunker as legacy templates are pulled from Gist and are currently broken.

mbostock• 14 years ago

The API is currently down: https://status.github.com/

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!

huskyr• 14 years ago

I'm also a bit sad that they're still using document.write for the embeds. That breaks on any site that uses Ajax-like page loading and is bad practice in general.

gbadman4• 14 years ago

As many have already said, Github just keeps delivering quality, well-conceived and well-integrated updates. I hope they keep coming.

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!

gbadman4• 14 years ago

Also, since we're talking about Gist, you can get your gists into Plunker very easily:

http://plnkr.co/edit/gist:1136236?p=preview is a snippet by the unbelievable Mike Bostock pulled directly from Gist.

Oompa• 14 years ago

I looked at Plunker, and then I got sperm on my screen.

nickpresta• 14 years ago

There is no preview mode for a gist :-(

gbadman4• 14 years ago

http://plnkr.co/edit/gist:<gist id>

farslan2• 14 years ago

I just wish a way to label or organize my gists. I have dozens of them. That would be great!

bencevans• 14 years ago

Much needed update and Looking Good but one thing, why is the 'Delete Gist' on the Edit Gist Pages rather than the Main Page?

DigitalSea• 14 years ago

It's about time. I've been waiting for Github to overhaul the Gists functionality, I've been ever-increasingly relying on it to store my snippets as well as posting code in blog posts, and being able to search through your own Gists is a MASSIVE addition.

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.

halayli• 14 years ago

It's great but I wish they added the ability to comment on a line.

subpixel2• 14 years ago

Doh! I just bought Evercode!

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.

chuckharmston• 14 years ago

The Sublime GitHub plugin for Sublime handles this nicely:

https://github.com/bgreenlee/sublime-github

subpixel2• 14 years ago

Awesome, thanks

bonjourmr• 14 years ago

Heads up, opening a Gist to edit/view from my list in a new tab (CTRL + clicking) doesn't work in Chrome 21.0.1180.75. The Stylesheet doesn't seem to load, not sure if this is an individual issue on my system.

hcarvalhoalves• 14 years ago

I'm getting "OAuth Failure" trying to sign-in [1]

[1] https://gist.github.com/auth/failure?message=timeout&ori...

tcdent• 14 years ago

I'd love to see the ability to print (with the wonderful formating in-tact, and none of the interface) directly from my Gists. There are various bookmarklets out in the wild that attempt to do this, all of which are of course broken after this update.

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).

revyver• 14 years ago

Gists does ship with a print stylesheet which strips most of the interface.

JaggedJax• 14 years ago

I like the changes, except that it broke syntax highlighting for php gists without open and close tags. For example: https://gist.github.com/3837352

VMG• 14 years ago

automatic language detection would be great

minikomi• 14 years ago

Thanks github team!!

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.

milkmiruku• 14 years ago

Whoops, horizontal scrollbar on 1024*768.

jcampbell1• 14 years ago

Every comment here seems to be a gist love fest. I develop fulltime and use git and github, but have never understood why or how people use gist. Can someone explain how gist is valuable to them?

Clicking "discover" at gist.github.com is unenlightening.

LawnGnome• 14 years ago

Most users (myself included) seem to use it primarily as a better pastebin than most of the pastebins on the Web. It's tied to your account (so you can manage previously posted Gists easily), it's versioned and available over git as an ad hoc repository, and the highlighting is pretty good.

jamesbritt2• 14 years ago

What I find puzzling is seeing what appear to be blog posts published as gists.

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.

chii• 14 years ago

its a slightly better looking http://pastie.org/. sharing snippets of code is quite useful, especially if the team is a remote team.

Sidnicious• 14 years ago

I use it for snippets of code that I want to save (and, maybe, make publicly available and link to) but aren’t serious enough for a repo. Here are some examples from [my gists](https://gist.github.com/Sidnicious):

- 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.

reledi• 14 years ago

Looking through both my secret and public gists, I've used it for

- lecture notes

- collection of resources

- snippets of code (for myself or remote teammates)

- todo lists

- tutoring

- and more...

nachteilig• 14 years ago

Am I missing it, or can anonymous gists no longer be claimed and deleted by the person that created them while still in the session?

c4urself• 14 years ago

is there any way to collaborate on gists?

stickhandle• 14 years ago

this is good ... but, frankly, i was hoping for the ability to tag gists + ability to get a feed from a tag

haberman• 14 years ago

I love it -- I've been looking for a place to put trivial programs that is lighter-weight than creating your own repository.

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.

minhajuddin• 14 years ago

Can't upvote this enough, It reminds me of the days when you had to have a banner at the bottom advertising the free site builder you were using. Not cool.

tedmiston• 14 years ago

GitHub sees the value in the snippet concept behind Gist and has been giving it serious limelight lately.

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.

ozh• 14 years ago

Gists are now wrongly named. For instance: https://gist.github.com/4260740 this sounds a bit weird that this gist is named "readme.md"

RyanMcGreal• 14 years ago

I'm currently getting HTTP 500 errors when I try to load https://gist.github.com/

josteink• 14 years ago

Tried it out. It's bloody fantastic.

As long as whatever you're editing is supported by the editor, that leaves little to be desired.

Nice work.

charlieok• 14 years ago

I don't understand the benefit of gists. If they're full git repos, why not just use a normal github project?

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?

zhuzhuor• 14 years ago

Does any one have problems to create or modify a gist? I am having the problem since this new face of gist.

Now it's still not fixed in my case. What happened to github?

Welcome to a New Gist

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