Tag: files

How to link directly to a line of code in a file hosted on GitHub – 043

It’s a lot easier to point someone directly to a line of code you’re referring to, rather than sending them the link to a file with a message “and now scroll to line 74.”

First, you’ll navigate to a file hosted on GitHub. It could be a file you’ve checked in or any random file in any random repo.

Next, click on the line number that you want to get a link to. In today’s example, you’ll see me refer to one of my sample Electron apps where I forgot to remove the line that shows developer tools for debugging.

And volia, check your web browser address bar. You now have a URL for that exact line of code, e.g. https://github.com/saraford/your-moment-of-github-zen/blob/master/main.js#L74

When you send this link to someone else, the line of code will open around the middle of the screen with the yellow highlight.

How to turn on word wrap when editing a file on GitHub.com – 036

If you like to write, you’ll often run into the text not auto-wrapping, especially on markdown documentation files.

Whenever you run into a case where the line isn’t wrapping, just look up and you’ll see the option to change the Line wrap mode from No wrap to Soft wrap.

Changing to Soft warp now shows the line wrapped.

I had to look up the difference between soft wrap and hard wrap, since I thought “why not just name it No wrap vs Wrap?” But I guess they wanted to be explicit in saying that this option wasn’t going to insert actual line breaks.

How to view the latest commit made within a particular folder on GitHub – 030

Something I had a hard time grasping early on using GitHub was why the latest commit would keep change. Obviously, at the root level (homepage level), the Latest commit is showing the latest commit for the entire repo, but why does it keep changing after that?

The latest commit is showing you the commit for the last time any files at this folder level were modified. Let’s look at my simple random-example.

When you go to the main repo page, you’ll see the Latest commit c8cac61 3 days ago (at the time of this writing) is the last commit to the repo.

But then if you click inside the Randomness folder, you’ll see the latest commit changes to Latest commit 567c29d 6 days ago.

And if you continue to drill down into these folders, you’ll see that the latest commit continues to change to c59c490 6 days ago.

What is with all these changes?

The latest commit is showing you the commit for the last time any files at this folder level were modified.

Again, I’m a visual learner (as you’ve noticed by now), so here’s an example. In the image below, you are looking at the C# Project folder called Randomness with Latest commit 567c29d 6 days ago. Notice how there are multiple files.

Clicking the Latest commit 567c29d 6 days ago shows the actual file(s) that were modified as part of that commit, which in this case was just one file.

How to view all files in a repo for a given commit on a given branch on GitHub.com – 026

I’m purely a visual person. I cannot put clothes into a dresser drawer. If it is out of sight; it’s out of mind. It’s that bad. Thus being able to view all the files in a repo for a given commit really helped drive home how Git is so different from other source control systems.

Going back to my random-example repo, suppose you want to see the state of the repo as of the first commit on master.

Navigate to the Code tab and make sure master is selected. (If you want to view the state of a repo for a commit on a different branch, use this Branch:master dropwdown button to change to desired branch.)

Now scroll all the way down to the original commit. You’ll see highlighted in the next image a <> button that displays a tooltip Browse the repository at this point in the history.

Clicking on this <> button takes you back to what looks exactly like the repo homepage, but with one key difference…

Instead of branch:master or branch:readme-draft, you’re now seeing this Tree:ad98b093 thingy.

What’s a tree? This question gets into the internals of Git, which we will learn together this year! To be honest, all I know right now is that every Git commit has a tree, so this dropdown button label is saying, “show me the files for this commit id.” You’ll also notice that

You’ll see that this Tree:ad98b093 commit id matches the id in the far right.

You might be wondering why the dropdown doesn’t show the list of all the possible trees to view. My guess is this list would be come unmanageable pretty quickly. And people probably don’t need to look up the state of a repo at a given snapshot very often.