gh-things: Github things

@readwithai - X - blog - machine-aided reading - 📖⚡️🖋️

A collection of command-line utilities to fetch information about "objects" in a machine-readable way (JSON) way.

Motivation

I often interact with github. It is nice to be able to automate the things I am doing, or just do then from the shell. gh has some good functionality but some of the features are lacking and JSON output is based on extracting individual fields.

This repository is a dumping ground for various tools to fetch inforfmation from github. It wraps the gh tool (normally gh api) to avoid having to deal with authentication.

Alternatives and prior work

The Github API is complete and can easily be called with gh api. You do however have to remember the API and read documentation when using it - which is fiddly for many tasks. This project provides a simpler and self-documenting interface to common parts of the api.

gh itself can often view objects with the --json and --jq methods.

Installation

You can install gh-things using pipx with:

pipx instal gh-things

gh-things requires the gh command-line tool.

Usage

To get information about a repository you can run:

gh-things repo url

Caveats

I will slowly add features here as I need them. I'll likely add methods for users and stargazers soon.

About me

I am @readwithai. I create tools for reading, research and agency sometimes using the markdown editor Obsidian.

I also create a stream of tools that are related to carrying out my work. As you are looking at this page, you might be interested in gh-views - a tool to get view statistics about a github page, gh-star-timeline which fetches and maintains star counts for a repository, or symbolboard2 and alternative ergonomic keyboard layout.

I write about lots of things - including tools like this - on X. My blog is more about reading and research and agency.