Month: January 2017

How to pretend the Windows Start Menu works the old Windows 7 way – 011

For those non-Windows users wondering “What the…This is supposed to be a Git(Hub) Tip of the Day!!” I promise it is. But remember, this is a Windows-first, non-Windows friendly blog series, so from time to time you’ll see some tips that only Windows users can relate to. Think about it this way. If you ever need to use Windows in the future, it can’t hurt to have a few tricks up your sleeve 😉

A coworker was telling me how much he missed the old Windows 7 Start Menu experience, where pressing the Windows Key immediately opens the Run dialog. I’m including this tip here in the series because if you are a Windows user and do not know about this yet, this tip will change your life on Windows.

Press your Windows Key and your Start Menu appears.

Note in the following screenshot:

I manually removed all of the live tiles. There’s an option to hide if you right-click on each live tile.
I’ve had the Windows taskbar docked to the right side of my screen since 2005. You’re able to see more items listed and you can read more of each item name, which is especially useful if you have multi-instance apps. E.g. if I had two instances of Open Live Writer open, I’d know which blog post I’m editing. But I digress…

Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for, take the leap of faith and just start typing, e.g. “notepad”

You’ll see below that the Windows start page thingy changes to the old school run dialog (of sorts). You’ll see whatever you type is shown at the bottom.

Be aware that if you mistype a word, like “notefoo”, Windows will kick off a Bing search in Edge for “notefoo.” There’s probably a way to customize this, but just be aware of some interesting Bing results from your typos! Smile

How to change the description of your repo – 010

Suppose you notice a typo in your repo description or you didn’t specify one at the time you created the repo. To the far right, you’ll see an edit button.

Clicking this button allows you to edit a description and a website URL.

Give it a little while, but your repo description will end up on the GitHub.com search page when you do.

I’m sitting here wondering, “is this a useful tip?” but then I remember that feeling I felt when I (finally) found how to do it. Originally I thought I had to update a repo file somewhere, since it took me a while to get used to what files GitHub’s UI gets it’s info from (e.g. license) and what files are metatdata for the GitHub repo itself.

How to view all files by language in a repo – 009

Not only does the color bar show you a breakdown of language usage percentages, these labels are clickable!

In my random-example repo, if you click on the VB 16.5% (or whatever it might be by the time you read this), you’ll see

Now you can filter all files in repo based on language without needing text in the search bar.

How to drag and drop files to your GitHub repo – 008

If you ever want to quickly drag and drop files to a repo (perhaps you’re a speaker at a conference and want to share your slides for your sample code), you can use the Upload files button that’s on the far right of the repo page.

A wild drag and drop box appears! (sorry, that was a terrible pokemon go impression.)

Now you can drag and drop your files into the box. Note that as you drag files, you’ll see them queue up. (Could you technically call this queuing up in staging? Conceptually you could call it staging, but I doubt that’s what’s happening under the hood). Sorry, I digress…

and volia, there was much rejoicing!

Note you might say, “Wait a sec… how is this added but yet the repo bar is still a single solid green color?

Good catch! You might have to wait a minute or so and refresh. Today I had to wait a couple of seconds and then a couple of minutes. Check out the support page if you’re having any issues.