[colin353]

I'm one of the engineers at GitHub who was behind this new UI, let me know if you have any questions. We chose React for this code search/code view because it has a lot of interactivity, and it has worked well so far.

And we do intend to write a blog post with more details in the coming weeks.

[rad_gruchalski]

I was not expecting to see this comment at the top of this thread but since it is here… this UI really sucks on mobile (at least on iOS).

A couple of immediate problems:

1) I am no longer able to visually distinguish folders from files, where did the folder icon disappear?

2) Swiping back is weird, sometimes it does work, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it either leaves me with a blank screen, or loads back what I just swiped away.

3) This really aggravates me, swipe back doesn’t preserve scroll position on long file listings, it renders the contents and scrolls to the top. This is really bad.

4) Where’s the footer?!

5) The whole thing just feels slow.

GitHub ui is getting worse on mobile as time goes. For example, why can’t I fork a repo from the mobile page?

I don’t know how you measure how your UI is used but I don’t think me browsing the code while sitting on the throne, or looking up a piece of code while laying in bed is so unusual. Maybe some of you should try that before such half baked stuff is released with much fanfare. Because the way I read it is “we’re excited to announce that we have broken your GitHub experience”.

[colin353]

Yep, aware of these mobile issues and are actively fixing them, will hopefully improve in the next week or so.

And thanks for the feedback. We're in Beta right now exactly so we can get feedback so please don't hesitate to reach out (in-app, via Discussions https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/categories/cod..., or any other way you can reach us), even if it's something minor

[rad_gruchalski]

If you’re in beta, how come do I see all this half finished stuff? Your beta features are usually behind a feature flag?

[colin353]

I'm guessing you are in our Code Search Technology Preview (which was at cs.github.com), which gives you access to this new UI as well.

By the way, feel free to opt out if you hate the new UI - it's super easy to opt out from the code view page, or from the feature preview menu.

[rad_gruchalski]

Thanks, that fixed all my problems.

[Aeolun]

> GitHub ui is getting worse on mobile as time goes

Like Reddit, they’re probably trying to push you to the mobile app.

[colin353]

Not the case, the mobile app is great, but we know developers use mobile web. It matters to us. Will definitely improve it

[Dayshine]

Have you fixed the problem where opening any moderately large document in chrome on android would just lock up chrome entirely? :)

The editor was clearly trying to load the whole thing!

[colin353]

We have fixed it behind a feature flag that isn't yet rolled out. Still experimenting with it. But expect to see that resolved in the next couple weeks

[rad_gruchalski]

Never. I often just look up some specific lines, copy links to those lines, send to slack or similar. Not sure how would that work with an app.

[Waterluvian]

Can you teach me how you absorb and respond to all this criticism/feedback with such grace? Worst part of my job. Well done.

[colin353]

Positive feedback feels nice, but negative is way more useful to making a great product.

We're changing an website that millions of people use every day. Hopefully we mostly have a positive impact. But if we're making it worse, even in a small way, that matters a lot to be aware of.

[Waterluvian]

Very true. I love “negative” feedback. But I don’t know how to not take it personally sometimes. It often feels like a failure. Especially when it’s a “darn I should have caught that!”

[ilikecode]

Everyone fails sometimes. Take every failure as a learning experience. Taking it personally and feeling emotions doesn’t actually help the problem - that you made a mistake and need to just learn and move on. Focus on the future, on the problem, on now, not the past. If however you make a mistake and get defensive and don’t learn anything then yeah it’s only a toxic thing on you. Learning from it helps you grow.

Masters of subjects don’t learn overnight. They learn over years, decades, a lifetime. In that time they make countless mistakes. But they persevere and don’t let it affect them emotionally and they grow into those masters.

I make mistakes daily. I’ve thrown away hundreds of thousands of lines of code in my career because it didn’t work as expected. But each time I grew a little and learned something to make the next iteration better.

[kjuulh]

When viewing code I like the feature, however, when browsing folder structures it is a completely redundant feature. And just adds visual clutter. This feels like a half-step between an editor and a static file listing. I would personally prefer either a very static view of the core, in pure html, or an interactive experience (Ctrl+.) for opening vs-code on the repo.

Secondly, the code search feature is nice, but is there a reason why it has to be a column to the right, couldn't it be part of the editor, like we're used to in most editors nowadays.

A gripe I've had recently with github, is just that it all seems so slow. It feels like trudging through mud, it may be, because I don't live in the US. But this is getting out of hand, and makes me want to consider leaving it for something else.

Sorry for the rant, I like progress, I just don't like unneeded complexity, especially for a tool I love =D

[colin353]

Appreciate the feedback.

> static view of the core

Not sure what you mean by that, can you elaborate?

FWIW we are working to more tightly integrate code search into the code view.

And absolutely, performance matters a lot to us. Sorry for the slow experience, you're not the only one, particularly outside the US. Only thing I can say is we're working on it.

[kjuulh]

Sorry miss-spelled. Meant static view of the _code_. Ie. Just a file listing with the option to view the code, like you've always had.

Anyways best of luck to you. It hasn't been an easy year for github with the downtime earlier in the year, and what I would expect to be a nasty migration from a monolith =D

[eyelidlessness]

How much, if at all, has anticipated and/or apparent stabilization of React Server Components factored into this [expanded] technology choice? Can you speak to considerations of other component frameworks?

[eyelidlessness]

I… guess I offended someone by asking what I thought were totally innocuous, curious questions that they invited. Of all the fucking things to downvote! I mean, by all means tear this’n to shreds. But if anyone has a problem with my questions above could you please be bothered to say why?

[jverrecchia]

Just because you didn't get an answer doesn't mean someone got offended. Chill.

[givemeethekeys]

Why not Svelte? Why not Stimulus Reflex / Hotwire?

[colin353]

GitHub has been investing in React for a while (e.g. see our accessible React design system https://primer.style/react/). Many developers at GitHub have experience with React, which helps. And the tooling is just more mature (IMO)

[dmitriid]

Why not Solid/Marko which seem to be tailor-made for these kinds of things (mostly static, with interactivity spliced in)

[eyelidlessness]

Marko is tailored for that. Solid has mostly focused on highly interactive SPAs until very recently. Solid’s creator also worked on Marko and has written a lot on the subject. But even so he mostly deferred to Astro for mostly static use cases with Solid until the most recent release (Solid/SolidStart) officially supported partial hydration.

[the_lonely_road]

Are you going to switch to API mode for Rails as part of this process?

[colin353]

This is just the first step of using React within GitHub.com, so we still use a lot of traditional Rails/ERB, even on the React pages (e.g. for the header/footer).