Going through a Github repo can be a very tedious process, especially when you are trying to search for specific variable names, words, or strings. Luckily, the site, GitHub1s literally helps you start exploring any github repo in about one second. The app brings necessary features such as advanced keyword search and file search to the repo through VS Code running in the browser.

How it works

Github1s is made possible with browser build of VS Code. Since VS Code can now run in the browser, pretty much all functionality you would get for the native version would be available to users in the browser.

VS Code has interfaces for adding extensions to the core app. This allowed the developer to utilize the FileSystemProvider interface to implement File operations and load the files from the Github repo based on the URL path.

Currently the app uses the Github Rest API for getting access to the repo files and loading them. Since the app is using the Github Rest API, it is recommended you create and set an Auth Token so that you can continue to view the files in the repository. Github1s allows you to authenticate through the app. This will make sure you have a higher Rate Limit, up to 5,000 requests per hour, which means more repos and files can be viewed.

Hosting

You would think that an app like this would have some complicated hosting, but as it stands it can actually be deployed using any static site hosting provider. For example they used Github Pages to host the app.

Awesome Domain

You probably already noticed this, but the domain name they got is pure gold. Just append 1s to github’s domain when in the repo of your choice and you are right there in VS Code.

Open Sourced

One of the coolest things about this project is that is it open sourced. This means that you can contribute to it by fixing bugs, adding features, and you can also view the code to see how it all fits together to make this app possible.

Because it is open sourced, this means you can fork a copy of it and make your own version of Github1s. github.surf is one example of a project that was forked and deployed. However, they are pretty much the same app  so we are not sure what was added to it.

Talk about doing one thing and one thing well . This app is great and a huge time saver.