improve our Gists experience

The original PR to fix #2886 has uncovered a bunch of headaches around how we handle Gists. I’m going to use this issue to track the various parts of the app that need changes to make it better and break these down into tasks once we’ve figured out what needs to be done, and it’s priority.

The items listed here fall into three different buckets:

• bugs that interfere with the experience
• polish to make Gists integrate better into the app
• features to enhance the overall Gists experience

Bugs should be a priority - we don’t want to prevent people using repositories in this way. The other stuff might come down the track, based on our roadmap or interested external contributors.

If you’re interested in this feature, please add your reaction here so we can gauge interest.

Cloning

Feature: We don’t have a way to let users clone their repositories down. This is being tracked in #2953

Bug: the current “Clone in Desktop” experience doesn’t recognise the Gist URL, and displays a confusing message about the folder existing. This was reported in #2886.

Repository Listing

Polish: If you add an existing gist repository to the app, there’s no real way to see that it’s a Gist - you’ll just get the folder name which isn’t really user-friendly. And it’s also grouped under “Other”

For reference, the header to a Gist listing looks like this:

So even for a gist containing multiple folders, it will show a filename in the header and use the description as secondary information. Not sure how to make this fit with how we’re displaying repositories in the list.

Push/Pull

Bug: when trying to push commits to a gist, it will fall back to the basic authentication. We should detect the gist.github.com domain and provide the existing credentials (if found)

TODO

I need to go back and revisit the domain that GitHub Enterprise sets for where gists are hosted - whether it’s a subdomain like gist.company.com or company.com/gist/, or how to detect this as part of probing the GHE setup. This will likely affect other how we address other things, so let’s dig into that first.

cc @desktop/core for any additional thoughts or input

[RollingHog]

Same request here. Just ran in this, it is OUCH indeed.

[steveharoz]

A four year old issue? Ouch. Is there any plan to fix compatibility with gists? Forget polish, please make it work at all without asking people to use the command line, which requires new software to be installed.