ENHANCEMENT REQUEST: Additional web repository display preferences, especially dates

[ADWolfe-LoyNO]

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Product Feedback

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I teach using GitHub and GitHub Classroom. Any semester I have fifty or more students with repositories which I sometimes check using clones, but I frequently check them using the GitHub web interface. These repositories are always linked through the GitHub Classroom "assignment", making it very easy to scan quickly for activity.

Unfortunately, the GitHub web interface always shows useless relative dates. I was just checking a group project repository from this Spring semester to see if any students were doing followup work and I was greeted with updates "last month." Well, of course last month. But was that last commit before or after April 23?

Please set up some display preferences for your users for displaying files and folders in the GitHub repository browser.

I would think that a few switches could be added to the repository browser to select how dates are presented. And while you're at it, the commit hash and committer would be useful (less for me than for regular development projects). Finally I hate the stupid Windows-derived presentation of folders listed before files.

Note that this information is virtually impossible at the shell level as well. Perhaps there's a gh extension but for now I use a script with git ls-files and git log -1 (with pretty stuff).

GitHub has been around for years and something as simple as display preferences for the absolute central interface of the site—well, these should have been implemented long ago.

[github-actions[bot]]

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