Migrating to gitlab...
When I'm browsing on github and not using git directly, the commit short-hash is the last thing I care about. You cannot see if your default branch has passed CI/status checks now. Those things should be first class citizens, that's why we put status badges all at the top of our readmes to make that info more visible with what we have.
It follows the trend of designing with lower information density. This trend IMO is not appropriate for developer tools.
Example: https://twitter.com/JahedDEV/status/1275532988772683776
I don't know why they think it's good design, it would be nice to know. All of their previews for it squash the window so it looks perfect, like their mockups I assume. Similarly, I have to have a dedicated, half-width window just for GitHub to workaround this.
new:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux
old:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200619163555/https://github.co...
and I can't find it in me to dislike the changes they've made. They've removed the double repo navbar in favor of just 1. They've added a right-sidebar that shows various info about the repo in general, like what the last release is. Before, I would open the branch/tag list to look at the versions; now, it's plain as day in the sidebar. For the main contributors, I no longer need to go to insights > contributors. They're shown in the sidebar. For the main languages, I no longer need to click on the thin color line. I find that the most common bits of info about a repo that I sought are now displayed in the main repo page. That's an improvement.
I don't understand why people are complaining like it's an absolute disaster. It's not perfect, sure, but this seems to bring significant improvements.
All that info that's now in the sidebar is temporary. All of it. I never need to look at a project language more than once.
However, it takes up 100% of the height of the page, so when I'm halfway through a README, the README gets offset by some magical space. The ghost of the 1 paragraph of "language/tags/etc." takes up that space. The README is not centered.
From a design perspective, this layout implies an equal level of hierarchy between the right sidebar and the main content. It implies that they should be referenced side-by-side. But that is just not the case. I want to meet the person who thinks that the document literally entitled "README" (or oh, I don't know, all of the files) is somehow as-or-less important than the tags on a repository -- which are usually just the title copy pasted anyways.
I develop open-source things and I absolutely love to use GitHub. In particular, I've spent a LOT of time reading README's and also writing them. I really think their centered layout should come back.
As a suggestion: Maybe they could shift just the _files list_ over for that sidebar, and have any block content not centered?
Or maybe if there somehow existed a compact way to organize that information. Maybe a horizontal layout because there is only a little bit of text. Something like that.
For those of you complaining, congratulations, you've discovered ~ nostalgia ~
In two weeks you'll inevitably find the old design ugly, and forget GitHub ever looked any other way.
In 5 years, each will get another round of improved designs, and there will be a thread on HN full of people complaining about how the new design sucks and how 5 years ago was "the good old days."
The new GitHub design is objectively better. The new MacOS 11 design is objectively better.
"Low information density" means less clutter. You find the information that matters quicker. Changes to padding/visual separation/sizing/etc. all provide similar context to which information is important, and how items relate. "Flat design" isn't some trend, flat icons are just easier to quickly recognize, and look far more crisp.
In both threads the degree of negativity is disappointing. Can we not have one or two positive comments on how crisp the new commit graph colors look, how nice the transparent pin dragging interface is, or how the action buttons are more prominent? Not to mention the entire code/README page. The flat rounded corner borders are very clean!
If you really don't like the rounded borders, use wget
* Removed/reduced visual separation between elements
* Flattened things more
* More padding
Looks like another case when a frontend team does something to justify their existence.
But let's look at the positives: the last redesign of that sort helped me to completely migrate away from gmail.
There better be a damn good reason for these changes, otherwise it's a pointless redesign that looks no better than it did previously while simultaneously adding a slight overhead as users "learn" the new layout.
Does anyone know of an option to revert this update?
Both on desktop and mobile there are a lot of useful info lost and at the same time, low density and a lot of empty space. But in addition there is no coherence.
For me, the mobile experience is illustrative. Look at the screenshot examples there: https://twitter.com/greatgib42/status/1275703359283122183?s=...
If you had no knowledge, you could think that after was in fact before.
Issues that I can see:
- No part of the readme/description visible anymore.
- Stupidly lost space, like nothing anymore in the top bar to use additional line.
- stars count was smart before by being on the button itself. Now one big empty button and a separate counter.
- for commit, issues, project... Everything was directly visible before. Now, a horizontal scroll is needed. I hate having to horizontally scroll on mobile web. (But maybe it is just me)
I just went to the Explore page and picked the first repo:
https://github.com/johannesboyne/gofakes3
You have to scroll so far down to find out what the project _actually is_. I know there's an about message on the right, but it's not great.
The new UI does look more modern, but there could definitely be some improvements.
But To be honest we all know what this re-design is for. Microsoft pushing Azure Pipelines ( github actions ). The previous github interface was not cute / nice enough for actions. So they re-designed the entire site to be able to push us towards Azure usage. ( that is the entire reason Microsoft Acquired github - slowly luring developers from opensource to the safe walled garded of microsoft. With a slow shift of Azure cloud offerings leaking in to our minds. ). And slowly taking over most organisations tool-chains.
- Large margins everywhere
- Sidebar gobbling up 20-30% of my browser window's horizontal space, no matter how far down I scroll.
- Hamburger menu hiding the dashboard and other frequently used links.
- Latest commit timestamp hidden by mostly useless stuff like tag and branch count.
This layout wastes a ton of space. Information density feels too low, which might be appropriate for a product landing page, but is counterproductive in a development tool. It also makes things needlessly difficult for people who multitask with side-by-side windows or have small screens.
On the positive side, at least this layout is less annoying than Gitlab's "bury everything within javascript menus" approach?
I don't like the circular avatars - I don't need the place I store my code to feel like a social network.
But the worst change for me is that the 'Languages' section is now below the fold. Now I have to scroll to find out if I should ignore the latest compiler, package manager or system tool because it was written in JavaScript.
Edit: Gah! I only noticed this by directly comparing old and new, but the filenames in the main list are no longer blue, so now on each row, the filename, commit message and timestamp are in three subtly different shades of gray. That, combined with the lack of gridlines just makes the whole thing look like word soup.
Unrelated to the redesign, but the documentation for things like Actions just scream "microsoft." It was really hard for me to find the important information; had to sift through pages of abstraction gunk where things aren't explained clearly or with code. Felt like IBM product pages. Very non-github. This clueless internet-explorer-type design trend will almost certainly continue IMO. They simply can't help theirselves.
Unfortunately I also don't like gitlab or bitbucket. Github circa 2012 was the gold standard for the design solution, while everything else was cluttered or pad-y or overreliant on side navigation. Now everything sucks.
What's sad? Actually, you can find the classic (good) github design alive and well in China: https://gitee.com/drinkjava2/frog
For example, the repository languages used to be at the top center of the page, while now I need to scroll past the bottom of the screen and find the information off centered in an awkward place.
The stars and other top bar links are off centered in an awkward way for the mouse and the eyes. Also, the profile tabs are less accessible because followers are now on the other side of the screen instead of in the convenient tab location.
Please contact GitHub with your feedback if you also think it's less accessible design.
I found and modified a Firefox user style to fix the alignment for wide windows.
Original mozilla userstyle: https://gist.github.com/healingbrew/acc65ad439379eabdbb276e8...
Modified stylish chrome extenstion userstyle: https://gist.github.com/montanaflynn/ca64cc0fcf55bcd4556a016...
I use this regex so it doesn't apply on the full width logged in homepage or /notifications:
https:\/\/github\.com/(?!notifications)(.+)
Before: https://imgur.com/3ogzYhI After: https://imgur.com/8zMwTLL
I really don't get what's all the fuzz about.
Turns out that glancing at the header was useful to tell what was going on!
On the plus side, GitLab's repo view (which I disliked because it felt cluttered and always hard to find what I wanted) is now easier to use and read than GitHub's, so that makes changing easier.
The metadata is placed to the right as it should have always been. The languages are in the sidebar and are visible without me remembering that typescript is somewhat dark blue.
Also the new look is more modern and unlike most people here I am not afraid of change.
> Hrm. I just got switched to Github's new look and feel... and tbh, I _don't_ like it. I liked the 3D depth of the prior buttons. The new ones are too flat, the text is thinner, and they're too rounded. I appreciate that people worked on this, but... why was this change needed?
(See tweet for a screenshot comparison of the "New Issue" and "Edit" buttons before and after)
The commit list looked like it was doing some sort of eventual consistent update, then I realized that hovering over different commits expands that one shifting rows up/down as you hover on different items.
GitHub: under new management. My theory about management is like my theory for bad music at venues. The management greenlights which acts will play, unfortunately most owners don't have a clue, they themselves are not the target audience. There are also legendary venues where obviously they were 'in the know'.
I gave some negative feedback about it earlier regarding this change, but it seems I might have been a part of the minority.
It seems to me like someone who doesn't actually use git professionally just arbitrarily move things around for no discernible reason. The UI elements that have moved don't seem to have any particular rhyme or reason. For example, apparently the "security" tab is worth being in the tab bar, but the releases aren't?
Frankly, I think it's inappropriate for a professional tool to change it's UI arbitrarily, or even for a marginal benefit, since all of the great many existing users now have to learn the new UI. These things should only be modified if there is a clear and significant benefit that justifies the trouble.
This makes me glad that I'm a Sourcehut user ( https://sr.ht/ ), since it's UI is much more sensible, and faster to boot.
There's no reason for the major layout change.
Sadly, this seems like yet another case of designers/project-managers having nothing to do and wanting to feel useful every once in a while so they go about redoing the design. Paypal, slack, spotify, and many others do it all the time it, so why not github.
Discussion on /r/github: https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/hei81f/
Personally I think it's an improvement on mobile - finally the entire README is readable by default.
That being said was there any warning/reasoning behind the change? I cannot find any announcements.
---
Alright, that's a big of an exaggeration but I don't feel like this change is nearly good enough to warrant significant changes to a professional tool I use. Like if you want to completely change my user-experience you better at least have a reason, not just do it for-the-lulz. After trying it out for a while under the feature preview I really don't get why they did this.
GitHub however, capsized one of its servers yesterday resulting in downtime for some including me and today I wake up to this horrific eyesore that Github has blasted onto my screen, which I can't revert or disable.
It now looks like a shameless rushed copy of the GitLab look. I'd rather use GitLab for real instead.
The thing I think I want at the top is the readme. If I'm looking for repos I need to know what it is before I look at the code. If it's a repo I'm working on I'm more likely to look at the code locally then the code on github. When I do look at the code on github it doesn't need to be on the front page for me. https://github.com/username/reponame/code or the links to various branches would suffice for me. Even if I am looking for the code the 95% of the time the code is not above the fold, instead there are several lines of folders and config I don't care about and so I still have to scroll down or search. In other words, the code at the top doesn't even help for code.
To put it another way, the code at the top is actively hostile to what I need to get done.
I guess if your display doesn't show the light grays and shadows as well it may suck.
I feel GitHub is making a lot of changes in a short amount of time and as someone mentioned earlier, it really leads to additional friction in our workflow. When we get used to one layout and then they change it, there is time and effort required to get used to the new layout. It's fine if there is some clear benefit, but I don't see any such benefit in this case...
Edit: today I learned a lot of young people sound like old people. Interesting perspective.
The way the top tab/nav bar stretches across the screen, while the content is centered feels broken to me.
https://twitter.com/joelkesler/status/1275557934290755584
(above) I mocked up what the repo screen could look like if it used Github's previous UI with the new layout (and fixed the fluid tab bar!)
main repository view on widescreen puts all the "Code, Issues, Pull Requests etc..." buttons way over to the left. Why not just centre it like the repository files view below it? Seems completely bizarre and adds extra mouse movement between files and the buttons above.
The only way they could do such a thing and not drive people away would be to come up with more useful features, but their redesign seems to have less basic functionality than the old UI did.
Microsoft will understand that github users don't care about their "branding" and if they don't, they'll simply drive those billions of dollars into an early grave like Yahoo does with everything that Yahoo buys.
>...but the elements in the global site header aren't (for some reason)
>the selected tab has a thin underline which is harder to recognize than a colored background, and isn't as clear (does it mean I'm currently hovering over it, does it just mean that section is important, is it the same as a notification badge, etc)
>the main column is off-center
>there's no separation or contrast between the list elements, making it harder to align things by eye
>the readme section doesn't have a header, making it look like the text "README" is part of the document itself
>there's an entire second column in the layout, placing both on an equal level of importance
>...but it only has a single paragraph in it, which leaves you with an empty column taking up space 95% of the time
>if a project doesn't have something, the sidebar will simply omit that section instead of showing the same element with the text "0 releases", "0 branches", etc.
>...which in turn trains you to ignore the contents of that column and not expect to find things there
>this also applies to the "about" text, the purpose of which is literally to be the first thing you see when loading the page - now in the sidebar, sandwiched between three lines of text in the same font, color, weight and length
>the labels at the bottom of the page are spaced out evenly, which actually makes them feel HARDER to click (the sizes of the hitboxes are the same, they're just much further apart) in addition to looking ridiculous
Guys, stop complaining. You're just afraid of change.
One thing I just slightly dislike is that the width of the body is limited, but not the width of the header. Looks inconsistent.
So in the middle you have the files, and the action buttons above that, on the right you have info on langs, the contributors, the "About" blurb, but on the left you could put a (live updating?) commit stream with just a small contributor pic and name, hash, time stamp (x days ago), and the first bit of the commit message.
EDIT: Instead of just a commit stream, why not add a "repo feed" on the left? Includes new issues, PRs, commits, etc. Live updates (animates new ones bumping into the top).
I can't relate to the OP's preference for Gitlab's UI. Gitlab UI is the reason why I don't use Gitlab.
I do like that sponsors appears more prominently; for a very long time financial incentives have been an unsolved problem in open source.
According to the new designers of the apartment you rent, this configuration is much more efficient. Meanwhile, for the next two weeks, every time you want to take a pee, you end up wandering into the wrong rooms looking for a toilet.
Product Owners: please don't treat your users like an afterthought, or refuse to help them adapt to the changes you didn't even ask them to accept. It's careless, and makes users immediately dislike your product.
When I come upon a useful lib, there would often be hundreds of forks. 99% of those forks don't make any commit on top of upstream repo. Why even bother forking if you're not actually changing the code? Can we agree those are useless and just hide them in GitHub interface?
You can list all the forks on GitHub, there's even a nice hierarchy, but no other information. So you open hundred tabs and scan all the forks to see if they are ahead or behind the original. There must be a better way! Few years back there was a graph that took forever to load, but it gave good idea of commits that each fork applied on top of original. Is it still available?
Maybe this is just because the best people are drawn to work on new products?
Another insane example of this is scrolling in the iOS AppStore app. If your finger happens to start a scroll on a button, the scroll is just completely ignored.
Apple used to write entire carefully-considered tech reports about how to handle this case (until the finger starts to move or some time has passed w/o moving, you're in a limbo state where a button tap or scroll can't be distinguished), but now they don't even try to get it right.
Like "hey lets get rid of the eye guidance thingy, so it looks less like a table?!"
Hoowever, the increased use of horizontal space makes it harder to read (imagine HN without the blank sides) and I believe the information density has been lost a notch way too much.
All in all I think I prefer the previous design because to me information readability comes first.
It actually becomes pretty decent if you zoom out to 80% in Firefox although the text becomes a tad too small. I believe making an extension to increase information density shouldn't be too hard.
And of course in the quest to re-skin everything for no reason, important things like last commit message and status were removed.
Other things aren't so bad but I don't think they make up for breaking the general alignment in such an obvious way.
Put back the "releases" link where it belongs for a start. And why is the code-issues-pullrequest etc left-aligned and the content it governs centered? How did this get out the door?
The "About" being moved to the right side is a good move, but the top bar being full-width is incredibly annoying.
If this is any taste of things to come, then I imagine I'll be moving to Sourcehut permanently earlier than I thought.
Did a quick jumble of the html and css to things I would prefer: https://imgur.com/a/1HEROxa
Not perfect but I like it more than what they went with.
Since this seems to be such a contentious issue, I wonder why they didn't keep the original style around as an option? Aren't stylesheets supposed to make that easy?
Like, 100% agreement with everyone complaining about how the sidebar de-centers the README, agreed, that's awful, but what rubs salt into the wound is the sidebar is full of useless garbage! Both as a contributor of code and as a consumer it's hard to imagine things I'd care about less. Have it in a cute little "info" tab that no one will ever click like all useless information, and keep the landing page of a project for essential information.
Previously they only shown few top lines and thus all README was not visible in the search engine. Something that awesomeopensource took huge advantage of.
I wish they can enable google analytics on Github pages.
People hate websites that look like they were designed by a programmer. Programmers hate websites that look like they were designed by a programmer
Developer tools should really be desktop first, instead of mobile first. I always wonder why we all use bootstrap as our goto so the site works on mobile, but then twitter barely works on a mobile browser.
Love that releases are shown prominently on the repo page! It's always been a 'trick' of mine to check for releases for a repo by appending `/releases/` to the URL. Now I don't have to, and can just peek at a glance.
I guess it is SourceHut actually; I think it could use a bit more texture/skeumorph on things like tabs and buttons, but it is so clean, especially since it uses my default sans serif font (which is condensed). There's just so much to do right, see: https://qui.suis.je/drop/sourcehut.png
The livesearch loses focus, then selects the whole item if you pause for a second. If you then continue, the search is borked.
If you search fo something in an organization, the next time you try to search it searches the whole site.
.repository-content > .d-flex { flex-direction: column !important; } .repository-content > .d-flex > * { width: 100% !important; padding-left: 0 !important; padding-right: 0 !important; } .repository-content > .d-flex > :last-child { margin-top: 2rem !important; } .Box-row:not(:last-child) { border-bottom: 1px solid #e1e4e8 !important; }
I also like that it's a lot friendlier to narrow windows (no horizontal overflow/scrolling); makes it more convenient to put it side-by-side with something else.
I’ve admired Github for having a clear and readable UI that didn’t change. All their UI feature additions before I thought were fantastic.
Devs don’t want to have learn new things if not necessary. I’m hoping it will grow on me.
javascript:void(document.getElementsByClassName("gutter-condensed")[0].childNodes[3].after(document.getElementsByClassName("gutter-condensed")[0].childNodes[1]))I'm not sure what was wrong with the old design. Now everything is too rounded and flat and there's not enough contrast.
I also liked GitHub better years ago when the top bar was not black, so yeah I can hold a grudge :)
The redesign is not that bad but there's still a lot to improve on. Before it was easier to scan the page from top to bottom but now the page feels a lot more busier because there's more dropdowns and sidebars. I feel like my eyes are jumping all over the place trying to locate things now. Wish they had chosen functionality over design.
Personally I would love to see some fixes to the project page where with the new Design you waste ton of space on the screen for things that you could see before just in a small row now they take 20/30% of the right part of the screen just if you don't scroll and if you scroll down you get 50% of the screen or more just white...
1.) Everything feels left especially on my 21:9 display. This makes going from opening issues to clicking "Code" a very long mouse movement.
2.) There aren't grid lines on the file view.
3.) It looks unprofessional. Professional tools have this feel to them, and this new theme doesn't have it. It feels like a toy that shouldn't be in the toolbox.
At this point I may just move to GitLab. It seems more feature packed and you can have it mirror a repo to GitHub for the users don't want to make the switch.
> Migrating to gitlab...
Wow, some serious "looks like JIRA" PTSD there. Did Gitlab promise they wouldn't redesign?
Upcoming https://gitly.org is going to have a similar design, even simpler.
It's written in V, so it's very light and fast. Open source release this week.
Other features (from the readme):
- Minimal amount of RAM usage (works great on the cheapest $3.5 AWS Lightsail instance)
- Easy to deploy (a single <1 MB binary that includes compiled templates)
- Works without JavaScript
- Detailed language stats for each directory
- "Top files" feature to give an overview of the project
I believe sometimes we tend to overreact to certain changes that have minimal impact on our lives, because of our attachments to the tools. For instance, on HN, we seem to get a sea of "That's it I'm moving to Firefox/GitLab/etc.." comments often when their counterparts change something. Sometimes those reactions seem warranted, and in this case, not really.
That's usually the first thing I read. Then I dive into one or two files to check things out.
As a user, I do appreciate releases being just... there on the front page. That's really about it though. Everything else sorta just feels the same.
Also, I don't mind using the right side for more information but... can we just left-justify the whole page instead of centering it? It'd provide way more space for info on the right and wouldn't... just be completely empty on the left.
* It's even flatter than the previous layout, which makes it more difficult to use. In particular, it's easy to miss the branch dropdown. * It no longer shows the last commit message, which is an extremely useful thing to be able to see, as others have noted. If space is an issue, they should shift the junk on the right of that section up beside the 'branches' dropdown.
I am not affiliated with Source Hut in anyway other than being a satisfied customer.
1. Not being able to click to a repo home page if you are on a nested page, or link to a file from the web etc.
2. Markdown files displaying in raw form when someone links to a ReadMe.md file directly etc.
I’d imagine 99% of visitors are on GitHub but, like me, are not always logged in and I’m not going to when checking simple things.
However, I do like the visual part of the new layout.
But for the diff view, it's great to see more of the line width.
Miss the last commit message and especially the status of it. Seems like a major loss of information to me.
The non-centered readme is a little triggering, but maybe I just need to get used to it
Kinda interesting. But beyond a README, I can't imagine making any significant edits this way.
How do I get rid of the right-sidebar ? This is terrible and a complete waste of real estate. And hopefully someone will tell me how to get rid of it... Thank you !
Everything looks great so far, so kudos for everyone involved.
- removed all the rounded edges
- added lines dividing the rows in the files table
I do wish there was an option to use more screen-width, and this does seem to be a step in that direction.
Wish they had kept the description and page URL top and center.
And at least made the tabs and badges area the same width as the content. I bet they'll eventually come to their senses about that.
Other than those two, everything else seems OK.
It completely destroys typical page parsing habits.
The header thing must be a bug, I can't imagine that won't get fixed.
I use GitHub very little these days, and have mostly removed it from my daily workflow. But, on the whole, I mostly like the new design. It's more pleasing to look at, and doesn't really interfere with the things I still come to GitHub to do.
I still feel that the notifications redesign was poorly done, however, and that's where I spend most of my time. I ended up completely disabling almost all of my GitHub notifications as a result. The notifications redesign drove me from visiting GitHub a a few times per day to a couple of times per week. But to be honest, my usage was already on the wane by then, it may have just accellerated it.
Functionaly, I'm having trouble finding things. Half of it is just because it's new but honestly some of it is due to stretching information apart.
I don't want to over-perform it, but I'm annoyed GH bothered prompting me for feedback on something that they were going to general release in less than a week anyways. I'm not really a cranky person, but I already wasted an hour of my life looking for some good plugins that would help me annotate the page to illustrate my thoughts.
I have a billion things more important than giving GH free feedback on my plate, but I was nonetheless naively looking forward to giving feedback on it because it was the first time I've ever been opted into a UI experiment where the ability to give feedback was so prominent that I felt like anyone actually gave a shit.
So. Now, I'm cranky.
1. The visual alignment of this design is miserable relative to the previous. I'm willing to entertain counterpoints from the actual designers here (and I do appreciate that this design is more responsive). I was going to send a number of nice little graphics illustrating how multiple strong visual lines are destroyed by this layout, but I'm not frittering away any more of my life on it, now.
2. The list of releases is probably the single most important signal on the page. And now, if a project has no releases, it's just an absence. There's no indication. I just have to know, from its absence, that there are no releases.
3. It's covered elsewhere in the thread, but I agree on the languages being moved. Someone notes that the existing location was obscure; fine, just force the existing indicators to expanded-by-default. They were in the right place. The second most important signal is what languages a project is in. In some responsive views this information is now at the bottom of the page. This is absolutely backwards.
Everything else on my commentary list is probably covered elsewhere here. If not, I don't really care.
P.S. In the future, don't jerk people around with feature opt-ins with less than a week of turnaround on feedback.
New version displays them all.
Thank you.
Thank you for not disappointing.
The navigation aligned on the left and the main section with code centered is so unbalanced it makes me nauseous.
Was there a reason other than "it's 5 years old"?
Please add a TOC Feature! Use what you have with github pages and Markdown!
The new layout has soft boundaries between boxes that make it harder mentally to distinguish one box from another.
Also, on mobile I'm not really sure how to go directly to commits to master.
Edit: figured it out...
- information is scatter everywhere - release is a lot hard to find - UX is bad on wide screen. I use a 32:9 49" monitor and it's pretty bad.