Whoa, did I get Nat's attention? Prepare for a brain dump!
- Keyboard shortcuts: I’m always triggering these by accident. There’s no easy way (AFAICT) to block or disable them. My browser and OS already define a bunch of keyboard shortcuts. Please don’t steal existing shortcuts for non-standard uses.
- “Mobile” view: this hides so much it's nearly useless to me. (And the desktop view is a pain to use on my phone when I want to check one little thing.) 100% of the reason I use GitHub today is because -- by default, with no action required -- it displays the (entire) README, and the list of files. That’s what GitHub is.
- “?w=1” has always been one of the most useful features of GitHub. It’s completely hidden, hard to use (it messes up my browser history), and easy to forget.
- Releases/Tags: this page has only Next/Previous, no page numbers. If you want to get to an old release, you have scroll down and click "Next", and then repeat that dozens of times. “git tag” is fast (right?), so I’m not sure why normal pagination is missing here. Other GitHub lists have it. (Oh, I just found from poking around that "Subscriptions" also has only Previous/Next. I think that one's new.)
- “Issues" attachments: only a handful of file types are whitelisted, and it excludes 10 common ones I want to use (not just videos). I’ve never been able to figure out why. Is there some security issue we're avoiding by making people rename their .csv files to .txt before uploading them?
- "Issues" email responder: I see people send attachments here, and it silently drops them, instead of attaching them to the issue, or sending them a response that it doesn’t accept attachments via email. I’m tired of talking people through this. At this point, I wish I could turn off the email responder entirely, because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
And finally, my Completely Unreasonable Requests:
- DOM stability. For example, when I'm not logged in, there's that giant "Create your own GitHub profile” banner, with the confusing “Dismiss” floating over a busy background, near the weird icon that looks like it might almost be a close button but isn't. I guess you have to always upsell, but nothing on github.com seems to ever have a stable DOM class/ID, even when there’s no reason to change it, so I regularly have to edit my user stylesheet to fix or block things I don’t want.
- “Issues" are the only major part of a GitHub project which aren't repos, so there's no easy way to back them up, or use them offline, or query them from a shell, or ... The GitHub docs always suggest some third-party API-based method for backing up Issues, and I've never gotten any of the free ones to work, and I shouldn't have to pay someone else to retrieve my own data. (The cynic in me guesses this is GitHub's primary mechanism for lock-in.) It feels like GitHub is a 2000's-era version control system, with an SVN-era bug database.
