Quick tips are random posts regarding something I discovered on my way to something bigger. They usually get longer than “quick” would imply, for which I refuse to apologize.
After some annoyances with the latest version of Safari, I switched over to Google Chrome full time. I had every intention of switching back when the kinks were ironed out of Safari, but the extensions available for Chrome have kept me hesitant to leave it behind.
I’m especially enamored with the great selection of GitHub extensions available. This is a list of the ones I use often enough that viewing the GitHub website without them is a shocker. Most of them are unobtrusive while adding functionality which has become essential to me.
My favorite GitHub Extensions for Google Chrome
- Diff for gist.github
- Adds colorized version comparison capability directly into a Gist page. Completely unobtrusive and exceptionally handy.
- GitHub Cue
- Adds a box to your profile page with “interesting” repository recommendations based on scraping the contents of public profiles you’ve starred.
- GitHub Difftools
- Adds additional diff options for comparing commits, tags and branches.
- GitHub HTML preview
- Adds a button when viewing HTML files in a repo to preview them as rendered documents, in-page. Great for viewing web development project files without having to go to an external demo.
- GitHub improved
- In-page changeset unfolding (plus some other subtle goodies) on commit history pages. Click on the line for a commit and see all of the diffs for the commit appear right below.
- GitHub Markdown Preview
- Adds Markdown preview in text fields on GitHub that support Markdown input. Great for when you’re wondering how it’s going to render that odd syntax you used for nested code blocks inside a blockquote.
- GitHub Repository Recommendation
- Adds a little “You might also like:” line to the header of any GitHub project. A little obtrusive, but it comes up with some cool suggestions based on the starred projects of other users who have starred the project you’re viewing.
- GitHub Tree
- When viewing a repository, a little Octocat shows up in your url bar, and clicking it drops down a full tree view of the repository structure with collapsing sections for quick navigation. That’s awesome.
- github-find
- Adds a search box to repository pages that allows search just within that repository.
Those are my current favorites. I’d love to hear about any others, or your favorite Userscripts, if you have some interesting ones. Drop ‘em in the comments!
