The GitHub Blog: New Features

We love using GitHub to write notes on specific lines in a diff — now it's super easy to do from any smartphone!

Just bring up your favorite pull request or commit, tap the line you'd like to write a note on, and start the conversation!

Sometimes when you’re in the zone, you get a ton of work done before you have a chance to pause and commit. You want to break the commit down to describe the logical changes you’ve made, and it doesn’t always break down cleanly file by file. You want to select some parts of your changes to commit at a time. That’s easy in GitHub for Mac.

Select one or more lines to commit by clicking on the line numbers in the gutter. In the latest release, you can select a block of changes at a time. Hover over the right hand side of the line numbers to get a preview of what will be selected, and click to select.

You can select multiple lines or blocks of changes by clicking and dragging. The left of the line numbers will select line by line, and the right will select block by block.

Now you can commit your selected changes, leaving the rest for a later commit.

We've added support for editing labels on existing issues with the l hotkey.

You can also edit milestones and assignees the same way.

At GitHub, we use lists for collaborating on software development, because lists are a simple and powerful tool for collaborating on anything. That's why we're introducing better visualization of list arrangements in our rendered prose diff view.

In Markdown, making a list is incredibly easy. You can make an unordered list by preceding list items with either a * or a -.

* Item
* Item
* Item

Nested lists are very useful for associating supplementary information such as notes to an item. To nest a list, indent the nested items:

* A list item
  * A nested list's first item
  * A nested list's second item
  * A nested list's third item
* Another list item

For example, many teams use issues and pull requests to keep track of what they're working on right now, and use a Backlog to keep track of features that haven't been scheduled yet:

Tracking Changes Over Time

Being able to see changes over time gives teams a perspective on the features and requirements that have been added to projects. We can see at a glance when features are added:

Removed:

Or changed:

Whether numbered or not, the order of items is usually significant. Rendered prose diffs show you when items have been moved up or down:

Work together, better

It's easy to see when list items have been added, removed, changed, or moved, just as it's easy to review changes to all of your documents in GitHub.

And unlike other products that place your documents in their own "silos," you can use as much or as little of the GitHub toolset to manage and track your documents. Pull requests, organizations, commits, repos, issues, comments, source diffs, and rendered prose diffs: Everything is available and everything works together with your development tools.

GitHub makes collaborating with lists 1,337% more awesome by tracking and visualizing the changes over time using the same powerful tools your team already uses to manage your code.

If you're anything like us, you get involved in lots of conversations on GitHub over the course of your day. Sometimes, a good conversation from earlier in the day is left behind and forgotten about, and you don't know if anyone else has commented after you (to tell you they completely agree with your well-written opinion, of course!).

To make sure you're always up-to-date, the page title now lets you know how many comments have been added since you last peeked at the conversation.

When you come back to the conversation, any unread comments will be highlighted, making it easy to pick up right where you left off:

Good news, everyone! Changing your public profile picture just got easier.

1. Click the "Account Settings" icon in the header.
2. Upload a picture of your awesome new haircut.
3. Crop the picture and save it.

You can keep using Gravatar; we just want to make it easier to update when the time comes to rebrand yourself.

In addition to seeing your browser session activity, you can now view activity for your SSH keys and OAuth tokens as well.

SSH key activity

Find the most recent activity for each key in the SSH keys section of your account settings.

OAuth token activity

For OAuth tokens, check out the Applications section of your account settings.

As always, we recommend that you keep an eye on these credentials and remove any keys or tokens that you no longer need.

We love watching trending repositories on GitHub every day. All kinds of interesting projects bubble up and there is always something new to catch your eye. We want to collect repositories we find interesting into categories for you.

Showcases are a new way to discover related repositories on GitHub. We take the most interesting trending repositories and curate lists to explore by topic. A lot like the staff shelf at your local book store.

On a showcase page, you'll find the full list of repositories that we're showcasing, including why we think they're special. On the right you will have a place to search all showcases, view related showcases, and any newly created showcases.

You can browse the showcase listing page to read through them all. You can also subscribe to the atom feed and stay up-to-date.

Thanks for reading and happy Exploring!

We've added several commonly requested features, making GitHub Pages an even better place to host websites for you and your projects.

Repository metadata

First, Jekyll sites on GitHub Pages now have access to some useful repository information such as the latest SHA1; the project title, owner, and description; common URLs like the download and clone URL; and the exact version of various dependencies used to build your site like Jekyll or Ruby.

Within pages and posts, repository information is available within the site.github namespace, and can be displayed, for example, using {{ site.github.project_title }}.

See the project metadata documentation for the complete list.

@mentions, emoji, and redirects

Second, GitHub Pages now supports three Jekyll plugins:

• Jemoji and jekyll-mentions enable emoji and @mentions in your Jekyll posts and pages to work just like you'd expect when interacting with a repository on GitHub.com.

• Jekyll-redirect-from provides an easy way to redirect visitors to the proper url when the filename changes for a post or a page.

For more information on using plugins with GitHub Pages, see the GitHub Pages plugin documentation.

Happy documenting!

To build and ship great software, you need to use the best tools available. From homegrown systems to third-party applications, integrating those tools with GitHub means better collaboration around projects, higher code quality, automated testing, easy deployments, and streamlined production operations.

Today there are thousands of applications and services that work with GitHub. Tools like Asana help you and your team stay on top of recent code changes by linking GitHub commits and issues to relevant project tasks. Services like CircleCI and Code Climate integrate with GitHub to test the quality of your code. You can even deploy code from a GitHub repository to services like Heroku and Amazon Web Services.

Integrations like these help improve testing at Airbnb, track code review at Harry's, and support continuous integration at Infinum. Do you have a favorite application or service that helps you and your team write code? Chances are it works with GitHub already. Check out some of the most popular tools that work with GitHub to help you build better software. Don't see your favorite integration? Let us know!

Whether you're just getting started or have been building applications on the GitHub API for years, the GitHub Developer Program is all about making sure you have the right resources to build the best possible integrations for our incredible community.

Providing developers with a great API has always been an important part of GitHub. Over time, the API we've offered has evolved – adding increased flexibility, greater capabilities, and more endpoints. Launching the Developer Program today represents the next chapter in this story.

By joining the Developer Program, you'll receive ongoing notifications about changes to our API. You'll be eligible to receive early access on select feature releases, and can request a development license for GitHub Enterprise. You can also submit your work for consideration on the integrations page.

Visit our developer website to learn more about the program and to register as a member.

We just added more granular permissions so third party applications can specifically request read-only access, read/write access, or full admin access to your public SSH keys.

You're in control

As always, when an application requests access to your account, you get to decide whether to grant that access or not.

Revoke with ease

In addition to these finer-grained permissions, we're also making it easier to revoke SSH access to your data. If an OAuth application creates an SSH key in your account, we'll automatically delete that key when you revoke the application's access.

To help you track security events that affect you, we'll still email you any time a new key is added to your account. And of course, you can audit and delete your SSH keys any time you like.

You can read about the new changes in more detail on the GitHub Developer site.

Today we are making it easier to review and collaborate on prose documents. Commits and pull requests including prose files now feature source and rendered views.

Click the "rendered" button to see the changes as they'll appear in the rendered document. Rendered prose view is handy when you're adding, removing, and editing text:

Or working with more complex structures like tables:

Non-text changes appear with a low-key dotted underline. Hover over the text to see what has changed:

Building great software is about more than code. Whether you're writing docs, planning development, or blogging what you've learned, better prose makes for better products. Go forth and write together!

Webhooks are by far our most widely adopted integration, but they've always been buried in a big list of external services. Today, we're making some major improvements in the way you configure, customize, and debug your webhooks.

First, webhooks are a lot more prominent in your repository settings page.

You can now configure webhooks directly in your repository settings, instead of having to use the API. You can also choose specific events and a payload format (JSON!).

Once you've configured a hook, the new deliveries section helps you track, troubleshoot, and re-send a webhook event payload.

If you've never used webhooks, we've even got a brand new guide to help you get started. Happy integrating!

When I discover a new project on GitHub, perhaps on Explore, I often wonder if any of my friends already know about it. People you know lets you see how many people you follow have starred that repository.

You can also see when someone is following or being followed by other people you know.