Logged in lately? You may notice some changes to your GitHub dashboard. We’ve updated dashboards to surface personalized repository suggestions, featuring a third column, new styling, and a full-width layout. GitHub is slowly moving to more full-width layouts and using one on the dashboard gave us the opportunity to highlight more projects for you to discover.

As part of this release, the “Discover repositories” page has found a new home under Explore. Repository suggestions appear on Explore and in the new dashboard sidebar.

Have feedback on the new dashboard? Let us know.

In the latest GitHub for Atom release, we’re introducing two new features that will improve your commit experience.

Rendering diffs in the editor

Previously, DOM elements were rendered for every line of each diff, which meant a lot of work for React and the DOM to process. This led to rendered diffs being limited to less than 32k bytes, resulting in the inability to load large or multiple diffs.

Now diffs are rendered using Atom’s TextBuffer. The text buffer’s most important benefits are improved performance when loading large diffs and the ability to render multiple diffs. A few other perks include keyboard bindings to use Atom shortcuts with the ability to navigate around diffs, as well as copy and pasting code from a diff.

Rendering diffs with TextBuffer makes it easier to review and edit code from within a diff view whether you’re making changes now or in the future. TextBuffer provides options, such as:

• Editable diffs: the ability to change text within the diff view
• Code folding: collapsing and expanding blocks of code
• Syntax highlighting: highlighting different “parts of speech” of code using different colors
• Multi-cursor edits: the ability to change text within the diff view in multiple places at once

Commit preview

Now you can use the option to “See All Staged Changes” before you commit, opening diffs of all staged changes in one pane. Seeing all changes at once makes it easier to double-check your work and write a meaningful commit message about your changes. Commit preview uses the new and improved diff rendering to render multi-file diffs.

While building out this feature, user research sessions gave us informed data to make (and finalize) changes to the design, color, and text of the button. This feedback helped us feel confident that the updates created a more intuitive workflow and led to a more polished diff view with a cleaner look.

What’s next for GitHub for Atom

User experience is important. Our goal is to make it easy to write, review, and collaborate on code within Atom. We have plenty of updates in store, but look out for upcoming improvements to pull request reviews.

If you have feedback about what we’ve worked on—or ideas for what you’d like to see in the pull request workflow—reach out to us in the Atom repository. We’re always looking for participants for our ongoing usability studies.

Sign up to help us improve GitHub for Atom

While you’re heads down contributing to your favorite repositories, GitHub is busy finding projects and people that share your interests. That way, when you decide to come up for air, you can easily glance at what the world’s largest software community has to offer.

GitHub already collects repositories for you based on projects you contribute to, star, and visit. To go deeper, we recently attached a simple “Star” button to every GitHub Topic. This offers you the option to plainly indicate which topics matter most, so we can fetch the code and developers that share your interests.

With this release, you’ll see your starred topics displayed on GitHub Explore, along with a fresh set of related repositories. The topics you star will also be displayed alongside your starred repositories in your profile’s “Stars” tab.

You can star a topic nearly anywhere you encounter one, including search results, individual topic pages, and the Explore, Topics, and Stars pages on GitHub.

Starring topics is a straightforward way for you to tell us what you want to see, so we can help keep you organized and connected to the stuff you care about most. Now we can start displaying more types of content within each topic, like related developers and events. And as you begin to tell us about which topics you’re interested in, we can start looking for patterns that’ll help us surface even more cool ideas for you.

Topics have been a community-driven GitHub feature since they were released two years ago. So far, developers have created more than 400,000 topics to build subject-based relationships between repositories. And the GitHub community started curating the descriptions, related links, and images for topics last fall.

Starting today, topics are related to you—not just your repositories. Needless to say, we’re thrilled to see what kind of GitHub gold we can help you discover.

Today we’re announcing two major updates to make GitHub more accessible to developers: unlimited free private repositories, and a simpler, unified Enterprise offering. We’re excited about these updates to our Free and Enterprise offerings:

• GitHub Free now includes unlimited private repositories. For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free. Many developers want to use private repos to apply for a job, work on a side project, or try something out in private before releasing it publicly. Starting today, those scenarios, and many more, are possible on GitHub at no cost. Public repositories are still free (of course—no changes there) and include unlimited collaborators.

• GitHub Enterprise is the new unified product for Enterprise Cloud (formerly GitHub Business Cloud) and Enterprise Server (formerly GitHub Enterprise). Organizations that want the flexibility to use GitHub in a cloud or self-hosted configuration can now access both at one per-seat price. And with GitHub Connect, these products can be securely linked, providing a hybrid option so developers can work seamlessly across both environments.

Learn more

GitHub Pro (formerly GitHub Developer) and GitHub Team are also available for developers and teams who need professional coding and collaboration features. And of course, open source contributors will still have everything they need to collaborate on public repositories, including our free version of GitHub Team.

Whether you’re a student about to write your first line of code, an enterprise leader with teams around the world, or an open source maintainer, we want GitHub to be the best place for you to code, collaborate, and connect with the global community of developers. Today’s changes are a big investment in the future of GitHub, and we’re excited to see what you build in 2019.

The GitHub Pull Requests extension in VS Code allows you to manage your pull requests directly from your IDE. Over the past months the team has added even more enhancements to pull request functionality. Using the latest version, you can now create pull requests, leave suggested edits as a comment, and view status checks for each pull request.

Create pull requests

To create pull requests in VS Code, hover over the GitHub Pull Requests title and click the + sign. Choose the target branch for the pull request, press enter, and relax—you’ve opened your pull request.

Suggested edits

Provide suggested code edits and leave them as comments with a diff that shows the current code alongside your suggested changes. The suggestions can easily be applied by selecting Apply Patch to commit the new patch of code.

You also have the option to stage all suggested changes when changes have not yet been staged.

Display status checks

Once you create a pull request, status checks will appear in the description. You can now view the progress of each check that was integrated: passing, failing, and in-progress.

Give the latest extension a try

Visit the VS Code Pull Requests Repository to view release notes and download the latest release package. Don’t forget, you can always install or update the latest version directly from inside of VS Code.