What you need to know
- Microsoft-owned GitHub announced a slate of new features at a virtual conference today.
- Key additions include the arrival of dark mode, along with auto-merge pull requests and more.
At its virtual GitHub Universe conference today, GitHub took the wraps off of a whole slew of new features for developers to take advantage of. The highlight, however, is something that will surely elicit a huge, collective sigh of relief (or cacophany of cheers): dark mode. No longer will you have to shield your eyes from your screen if you just happen to open GitHub in a dark room.
GitHub's dark mode is available now as part of a public beta. You can enable it in the "appearance" portion of GitHub's settings. Though, with this being a public beta, expect there to be at least some wonkiness involved.
Beyond just being kinder to your eyes, GitHub is making it simpler for pull request authors to merge their requests after reviews and checks have passed. Pull request auto-merge will let authors opt in to have their pull requests merged automatically once all reviews and status checks are completed. This new feature is set to launch in public beta starting next week.
GitHub repositories are also getting access to a new space for their communities to interact. Fittingly called "Discussions, the feature allows people to have ongoing conversations about a project in a dedicated space, ask questions, and more. Discussions can be pinned, issues can be converted into discussions, and more.
Discussions is available now in beta for all public repositories.
GitHub Unicerse is set to run through December 10, with lots of discussions for developers to dive into. For more, you can check out the GitHub Universe page.
