Improvements for repository list

I have a lot of repositories in my github, about 50 or so. I have a project that I work on very regularly, and it consists basically of 4 different repositories, e.g. server, client, system, and site. These repositories are named accordingly, with a prefix for the name of the project, e.g. myproject-server, myproject-client etc. I use the same pattern for various other projects that have multiple repositories.

In the old github desktop for Mac, the repositories were always visible on the left hand side. When I scrolled down to the position where the 4 myproject-xxxx repo’s were, it would stay on that position and it was very easy for me to switch between them with just one click on the repo name. As the scroll position wouldn’t change, it had good visual grepping and you could see which repo was selected and active.

In the new github desktop, this experience has been severely degraded for several reasons:

• I need to click an extra time to open the list of repositories
• Once open, the list of repositories is scrolled to the top, so I have to scroll down and find the myproject-xxxx projects each time
• Even using the filter doesn’t help much, because I would have to type myproject every time I open the list

It might not seem like much, but if you work on a project a lot and have to switch between repositories 30 or 40 times per day (not an exaggeration) then it really adds up and you lose a lot of time scrolling or typing the repo name. It’s one of the reasons that I still go back to the old app a lot.

Since you’re probably not going to add an option to have the repositories visible permanently as was the case in the old version, I would like to offer some suggestions which are fairly minimal in scope yet I think will drastically improve this user experience:

1. Remember what the user filtered for when re-opening the repositories panel and reapply this filter
2. Remember the scroll position of the repositories panel between closing and reopening so your focus is not lost
3. Enable keyboard shortcuts to navigate between repositories in the list (e.g. cmd-up for previous repo, cmd-down for next repo)

Thoughts?

[Seb33300]

I have the same problem. I wish to be able to have the repositories panel open permanently…

At this time, I still use the previous github desktop version for this reason.

[adamreisnz]

@shiftkey have just tried the filter, it works great! Makes my life so much easier, thank you. 💯 🎉

I think this ticket can be closed now, as this feature does the job well. I can navigate the filtered repositories list with a CMD-T + up/down, which is fast enough.