This One Simple GitHub Trick Will Save You Hours
Sooner or later, you’ll have a real need to browse someone else's GitHub repository. When the repositories are quite small, this is a trivial task. However, when they are large, it means cloning huge repositories to your disk which can take a long time.
Today, I became aware of https://github1s.com/. In a nutshell, it’s amazing. To preview how good it is, I used it with a repository that I had to clone once, namely, the Xamarin.Forms repository. Doing this was a pain because there are literally thousands of files, and I was looking for how something was implemented. Traditionally, that would mean cloning the code, and then opening it in Visual Studio while my computer slowly melted. I didn’t actually want to build Xamarin, I just wanted to see how something was invoked. So I needed something between the standard GitHub editor, and cloning the entire repository, and viewing it locally.
So, for example, the Xamarin.Forms repository is here: https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms. It’s huge.
Typically, cloning this would take an absurd amount of time. It’s a worse trade off when I know “kind-of” what I’m after, and I just need a glorified text editor to make it easier for me to navigate the code. My friends, enter github1s. Dubbed “One second to read…
