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Leonardo Montini for This is Learning

Posted on • Edited on • Originally published at leonardomontini.dev

Some cool GitHub features to enhance your development experience

Hello everyone, Leonardo here!

Today we talk about GitHub and some cool features it offers to improve the context and the communication between developers, through Issues and Pull Requests.

As usual, before diving into the article, let me share the video version you can find on my YouTube channel:

These are some of the features shown in the video:

Code suggestions

With a special syntax, you can suggest code changes when commenting a Pull Request.

Everyone with write access to the repo will see a "commit" button to immediately commit the suggested change.
Code suggestions


Render labels

Yes, labels can be nicely rendered as well, here's an example:
Rendered labels


Show details of linked issues

When you link an issue with # followed by the issue number, a link is rendered. However, if you do so in a list, the issue (or PR) is expanded and the name and the status are displayed as well.

By the way, you can mention issues with GH-[IssueNumber] as well!

Details of linked issues


Close issues automatically when PR is merged

Mentioning an issue in a PR, with some special keywords (for example closes #3 or fixes #3), will enable this cool feature. As soon as the PR is merged, the issue will be marked as closed.

If this is activated, you can see it in the bottom right corner of the Pull Request.

Closing issue


Marking an issue as duplicate

If you type Duplicate of and mention an issue, that one will be marked as duplicate and it is shown right below your comment.

Duplicate


If you want to see all of these in action plus some additional ones, you can watch them in this 3 minutes video!

If you want to support me, go watch it and leave a like ❤️


Do you know of some other cool features? Let me know in the comments!


Thanks for reading this article, I hope you found it interesting!

Do you like my content? You might consider subscribing to my YouTube channel!
You can find it here:
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Top comments (6)

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derlin profile image
Lucy Linder

Another cool thing is the dot (.) shortcut. Pressing dot on any github repo will open it in a web-based editor based on vs code.

From the doc :

With the web-based editor, you can navigate files and source code repositories from GitHub, and make and commit code changes. You can open any repository, fork, or pull request in the editor.

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balastrong profile image
Leonardo Montini

True, that one is also really cool and I used it a few times to better navigate through the codebase, but technically it can do much more!

Ok, these two are already in the list for the next video 😄

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derlin profile image
Lucy Linder

Great 🤩 Please, ping me / mention me for your next video, so I don't miss it!
(Already subscribed on YouTube, but I have so many subs...)

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balastrong profile image
Leonardo Montini

I will! :D

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derlin profile image
Lucy Linder

A cool feature to mention is the command palette, similar to spotlight in Mac OS.

To open it:

  • macOS: ⌘ k or ⌘ opt k
  • other: Ctrl k or Ctrl alt k
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balastrong profile image
Leonardo Montini

I didn't know that, that's amazing! Thank you so much for sharing! ❤️