GitHub Beyond Your Browser

One of my goals at GitHub is to make GitHub more approachable to developers. If you use GitHub, I want you to have tools that complement the way you work and help you to be more effective. In some cases that’s integrating directly in your Editor or IDE of choice. In other cases, it’s offering tools that work side-by-side with your existing tools.

Today, we took one step towards that goal with the release of two major releases: Git and GitHub integration in Atom and the new Desktop Beta rebuilt on Electron.

For Desktop, our plan is to eventually replace the existing platform-specific clients with the new Electron based client. For now, you can run them side-by-side.

If you’re interested in more details about our efforts, we wrote a pair of posts in the GitHub Engineering blog.

• How Four Native Developers Wrote an Electron App - describes the benefits and pitfalls of taking native developers and having them build a desktop app using web technologies.
• Integrating Git in Atom - describes the challenges and tradeoffs made when integrating Git with Atom.

And before I forget, all of this is open source.

• https://github.com/desktop/desktop
• https://github.com/github/atom

I hope you get involved!

If you are attending GitHub Satellite next week (May 22-23) in London, I’ll be giving a talk that demonstrates some of the great work my teams are doing and how that fits into this grand vision. See you there!