Repositories are difficult to find, navigate, and differentiate

Please describe the problem you think should be solved

We’ve seen many issues suggesting to change the way we either visualize or group repositories in GitHub Desktop. Right now we just organize repos alphabetically and it’s tricky to differentiate many of them visually because it’s just in the format of [repo name], which doesn’t account for a variety of different scenarios. We have a tooltip that displays on hover, but it’s relatively undiscoverable, slow to appear, and requires you to look at each repo individually to differentiate. We also group repos that are on GitHub.com separate from those that are purely local or on another remote. We do have filtering repos via a text input in place today, which should be helpful, but obviously not sufficient based on the feedback.

There have many different implementations suggested, so I wanted to try organize most of the issues I could find in one place to attempt to get our arms around the problem areas as we try to determine a path forward. Ideally, whatever we implement would be something we could work forward from and we could therefore close and/or remove future proposal from all the previous issues.

Relevant issues:

Group repos by organization and show full repo name: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/1533 Ability to “pin” repos to top of list: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/2038 Allow repo list to be always expanded: #1593 Group repos by organization (and make orgs collapsable): https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/2037 Add categories for repos to be grouped together: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/4945 Add folders for repos to be grouped together: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/1598 Group or filter repos by Topics: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/4958 Drag and drop and/or add labels to repos: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/2324 Add visual differentiation for repos: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/1929 Add a keyword to repos in Desktop: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/4940 Add placeholder name for repos in Desktop: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/3197 Support multiple windows: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/3606 Don’t persist repo filter after selecting one: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/4273 Filter across multiple repos with OR operator: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/5280 Repo order is not maintained alphabetically after filtering: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/4184 Keep changed repo (local changes) at top: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/10946

Slight variation Some way to visually distinguish worktrees: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/5764

Additional contextual things: Which repos have unpushed changes without having to go through the whole list: https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/7053

Potential problems on ordering/grouping:

1. I want to access the same [x] repos frequently, and navigating to them is unnecessarily time-consuming.
2. When I’m a member of many organizations, I’m only interested in repos for a particular org at a time and having them intermixed and always visible makes it hard to find the ones I care about.
3. Similar to 2 above, filtering only filters on the repo name, but if I want to see the repos in a particular org, for example, there’s no way to accomplish that.
4. My mental model of organizing my repos doesn’t fit nicely into alphabetical / by GitHub org / other out of the box way of grouping them together.
5. I can’t always remember the name of the repo I’m looking for exactly for filtering to work.

Potential problems related to visualizing:

1. If I have the same repo cloned in multiple locations locally, there’s no way to visually differentiate between them without the tooltip, which is slow to appear and undiscoverable.
2. I sometimes can’t remember what each repo is actually for just by the name, and it would be helpful to have some metadata to trigger my memory.
3. If repos have the same name but are under different orgs, there’s no way to differentiate between them except with the tooltip (see 1 above).

Additional considerations

1. We should account for forks
2. Not all repos are pushed up to GitHub - ensure we account for that
3. Org names and repo names are often long and this should account for that
4. Worktrees also share the same problems of visually distinguishing them (see: #5674)

I’m sure I didn’t capture everything here, so please feel free to suggest edits to this, and feedback is absolutely welcome.

cc: @desktop/design @desktop/support @nerdneha @adamreisnz

[adamreisnz]

but the latest beta release that went out today contains #6923, which sorts the repos by owner, and adds the org name to the filter so you can quickly get all repos for a particular owner.

This is great! Already a huge improvement in navigating and discoverability of repo’s, awesome work.

[EdOverride]

How about we just allow to create single level category and move repos in that?

This solution would be easiest to implement and would be enough for most people, who have 30+ repos in the list.