Master GitHub: 10 Hidden Tricks to Boost Your Workflow

GitHub is widely used, but many useful tricks remain unknown. This article shares a collection of handy GitHub tips.

Ignore whitespace in diffs

Append ?w=1 to the URL to hide whitespace changes.

View an author’s commit history

Add ?author=username to the URL, for example:

https://github.com/rails/rails/commits/master?author=dhh

Compare branches

Use a URL like the following to compare branches:

https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/master...4-1-stable

You can also use date‑based or relative references:

https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/master@{1.day.ago}...master
https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/master@{2014-10-04}...master

To compare with a fork, prepend the fork name:

https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/byroot:master...master

Embed a Gist via HTML

Gists provide JavaScript embed code, but many sites block it. Append .pibb to a Gist URL to get a pure‑HTML version that can be copied directly, e.g., https://gist.github.com/tiimgreen/10545817.pibb.

Git.io short URLs

Git.io offers short URLs for GitHub links.

You can create a short link with curl:

$ curl -i http://git.io -F "url=https://github.com/..."
HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Location: http://git.io/abc123

$ curl -i http://git.io/abc123
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: https://github.com/...

You can also specify a custom code:

$ curl -i http://git.io -F "url=https://github.com/technoweenie" \
    -F "code=t"
HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Location: http://git.io/t

Highlight specific lines

Add #L52 to a file URL to highlight line 52, or use a range like #L53-L60. You can also click line numbers while holding Shift.

https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/activemodel/lib/active_model.rb#L53-L60

Quick quote

Select a comment and press r; the text is copied as a quoted block into the comment box.

Task lists

In issues or pull requests, use the task‑list syntax:

- [ ] Be awesome
- [ ] Do stuff
- [ ] Sleep

After checking items, the Markdown updates to:

- [x] Be awesome
- [x] Do stuff
- [ ] Sleep

Diff and patch of a pull request

Append .diff or .patch to a pull‑request URL to view the raw diff or patch:

https://github.com/tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet/pull/15.diff
https://github.com/tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet/pull/15.patch

The result is plain text:

diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 88fcf69..8614873 100644--- a/README.md)
+++ b/README.md
@@ -28,6 +28,7 @@ ...
- [ ] Sleep

(...)