Show HN: Gitcasso – Syntax Highlighting and Draft Recovery for GitHub Comments

github.com

18 points by etwigg 5 hours ago

I built a browser extension called Gitcasso which:

- Adds markdown syntax highlighting to GitHub textareas

- Lists every open PR/issue tab and any drafts

- (Optional, unimplemented) autosaves your comment drafts so you don’t lose work

I made it because I was impressed by https://overtype.dev/ (a markdown textarea syntax highlighter) which went big on here on HN a few weeks ago, and it seemed like a perfect fit for a GitHub browser extension. Keeping up with changes on upstream GitHub would normally be a pain, but with with Playwright and Claude Code it seemed possible for it to be nearly automatic, which has turned out to be mostly true!

This was the first time where I built a tool, gave the tool to AI, and then AI used the tool to make the thing I hoped it would be able to make. I'm pretty sold on the general technique...

GitHub repo (Apache2-licensed, open source): https://github.com/diffplug/gitcasso

Video walkthrough (2 mins of the tool, 12 mins of its development tooling): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm7fVg4DWqk

And a text writeup with timestamps to the video walkthrough https://nedshed.dev/p/meet-gitcasso

andreynering an hour ago

For those that don't know, on Settings > Appeaarance there is a setting for "Use a fixed-width (monospace) font when editing Markdown". It's already a good QoL improvements (and it should be the default, honestly).

https://github.com/settings/appearance

  • etwigg 37 minutes ago

    At the beginning of Gitcasso, I took a little survey of GitLab, Reddit, ChatGPT, Claude, etc. to see how they were doing their textboxes. Of those I just listed, GitHub is the only one still using a plain textarea, all of the rest have a wysiwyg richtext gizmo (with GitLab and Reddit you can opt-in to markdown).

    But by using the same variable-width font that the rendered comment uses, GitHub's default gives you more of a wysiwyg experience than a monospace font does. With syntax-highlighting it's an even more wysiwyg feel, but with absolutely none of the content ambiguity that richtext normally brings with it.

    I came away really impressed with GitHub. For any given decision, it's hard to tell if the market victor won because of their good taste or if they won in spite of that particular decision and there was somewhere else where the good decisions were decisive. But as the GitHub issue/PR commenting system stands today, I have a hard time finding much to gripe with (except the missing syntax highlighting, of course).

dorianniemiec 5 hours ago

The idea seems good - this can make Markdown in the comment editor more readable!

But when I tried your Chrome extension, I found a problem - the comment box became light mode, when GitHub is in dark mode...

I have opened a GitHub issue about this problem.