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Effortlessly Review GitHub Pull Requests: A Step-by-Step Guide

  • 3 minute read

If you are like me and have to spend a lot of time reviewing large patches on GitHub you know it is a daunting task.

Reviewing a Large Pull Request Before

There is no easy way to navigate through multiple diffs so you have to scroll a lot (and I mean a LOT) and watch very carefully to not to miss what you are looking for.

It is tiring and frustrating.

irek00.png

Navigating the Pull Request After

I asked GitHub to at least add hotkeys so I could jump between files, instead of scrolling like a caveman. They said no. So I shook my wooden club and built a Chrome extension just for that.

Now I was drunk on power, about what an extension could do. So I built the ultimate navigation widget - an hierarchical view of files.

irek01.png

This sidebar allows you to:

  1. See the scope of changes at a glance.
  2. Collapse folders so you can focus on what’s important.
  3. Click on a filename to navigate to the diff.
  4. See how many comments posted for a file so you know there is a discussion (not shown on the screenshot).

Additional achievements unlocked:

  • Jump between files with j/k keys.
  • Jump between comments with n/p keys.
  • Toggle the sidebar with the z key.

Please give it a try. I hope you’ll find it as useful as I do: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/github-code-review/lminappfll…

For anyone who wants to see the source code, or even contribute to the project, here is the link to the repo: https://github.com/irek02/chrome-github-code-review. I am big fan boy of Test Driven Development (TDD), so major features of the extension are built with tests first.

It takes a bit of learning to setup a TDD-enabling environment for a JavaScript project, but the results are worth it: you build bulletproof code and you do it much quicker.

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