Redesigning GitHub Repository Page

There's important metadata about the structure of a project when looking at the last commit of a group of files: do they all change together? They are more tightly coupled to one another if so. If all the files are touched by each commit, then there's an issue with the project's development process or organization of code. I also tend to run into issues frequently that were introduced by the last change to a particular part of the codebase. If I can navigate to the appropriate directory and look at the commit messages for each file, I can often be pointed directly at the commit that caused the problem and the files involved with the change.

Secondly, when developing, I'm already running the latest version or something later, so looking at closed issues contains no useful information whatsoever. I'm looking for two things: 1) What I should work on next, or 2) Is the problem I'm seeing already reported and has any work already been done on it?

Not showing open issues also has the negative UX that people will look to see if their issue already exists in whatever page they land on, and if they don't see it, create a new one. Therefore, defaulting to closed issues has the potential to raise the number of duplicate issues by some amount. Project maintainers don't like this much.

No, no, no, NO!!!11 I've had it with these "sea of floating text on an expanse of white" redesigns, seeing yet another one follow this mindless trend just disgusts me thoroughly. The lines, subtle gradients, and other affordances of the old design serve to organise and direct your eyes into the appropriate sections; without them, everything blends together into a jumbled mess and it almost looks like the stylesheet didn't load fully.

If you feel disoriented, give it a minute.

I've had to put up with such redesigns for literally years now (I don't remember when the trend started --- mid 2010s?) and I don't feel them getting any better --- and eventually get around to making a user stylesheet to make them look better than they used to.

In contrast to the article this is one of the very few redesigns of a site which I actually would like (not mine, previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17242367): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/De17PIKXUAE27W6.jpg:large

If you know someone at Github, send them a link to this article. Maybe someone there will like my ideas and eventually get to implement them

Hopefully not. "Don't make me get out the custom stylesheet editor..."

Or as I've had to do with other VCS in the past, "what was the last thing that happened to this file?" is a commonly asked question which that description answers, especially when there is a bug in it.