Accessing Gists from the Desktop

GitHub Source Hosting

This morning I was thinking about the snippet manager I saw on Twitter... and then I realized that Gists on GitHub are exactly that - and why not just check out the status of the Sublime Text 3 plugin that deals with Gists... and the Vim plugin to do something similar.

I had to update the access token for the Sublime Text 3 plugin, and then it was working fine. But one thing I noticed was that the Gists showed up in the editor as modified files. While that's understandable if you realize the model for this is to read the Gist, and then paste it into the editor window, it's not really the workflow I expected to see.

Additionally, the syntax highlighting wasn't being triggered, so the Gists all had the syntax type of 'Text' - which was really annoying... given that the extension was exactly what you'd need to trigger the syntax type of the file. So that wasn't as nice as I expected. But it still worked.

Then I went to Vim and updated the Gist plugin, and that was interesting, but not as horrible as it could be. Still... it's a bunch of command-line steps, but it's OK. Again, there was another auth token from GitHub, which is nice, but that's about it.

The difference is that when you load a Gist into a Vim buffer, it is not seen as modified, and the syntax highlighting is correct. So those are nice to see in Vim, and while it's not amazing, it is nice to see it done right.

In the end, I'm glad to have updated these things - even if I really wish there was a nice macOS client like Dash that worked with Gists.