There are two primary reasons why you’d want to fork a repo.
- You want to submit a patch, or as the kids call it today, a Pull Request.
- You want to experiment with changes and save them up to your forked GitHub repo.
In yesterday’s tip, I opened an Issue about my your-moment-of-github-zen electron app not being usable on Windows. In the upcoming tips, you’ll see how you can fork a repo and submit a pull request. But first, you’ll need a fork of the repo.
Go to the Fork button located at the top right of the repo
Clicking the Fork button will display a message asking you to wait a few seconds…
When finished, you’ll notice that your new GitHub repo looks similar as before, but with one key difference. Under the name of the repo you’ll see “forked from” with the name of the repo you’ve forked this from.
Sara Ford's Blog 
Oh!! You had a separate account so that you could fork one of your own GitHub repos. Ahhhhhh!
Then you could rename and fork it back, I suppose.
That would have done the history-preserving that I wanted when I split out a separate project from one that is being developed further for a different specific purpose. They will be refactored differently and never merged.
I think I had better keep following these 🙂
LikeLike
Hey, yes this is a separate account. I realized too late that I should have used a more descriptive separate account to show what was going on, and I didn’t want to go back and redo a bunch of images. Next time I’ll know better! I wanted to demo on a repo I have control over so I can show what it looks like on the maintainer’s end (i.e. the user who is reviewing the PRs and merging them).
FWIW, it does not look like you can fork your own repos (using same account). I just tried on website, and GitHub.com just looks like at me. There’s also this SO article. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10963878/how-do-you-fork-your-own-project-on-github
LikeLike