Using Gist As A Snippet Library

GitHub has been around a while now and was recently bought by Microsoft. In my opinion, it’s the best / feature rich platform for source control, team collaborative develoopment and documentation for developed apps .. and one of the features that many will be less aware of is Gist.

Gist on GitHub allows single or parts of files to be shared, its also has a feature of a “private Gist” which allows you to make your files non discoverable (so private to you). One of the ways that I use Gist is as a code snippet library, whilst there are many apps around for various platforms, having an extension to GitHub based on open source makes the most sense to me and ensures over time that I have options to modify / move my snippets library if required.

One of my recent discoveries is a Gist client called Lepton, which is available for Mac, Windows and Linux – using this on the Mac as a local client allows me to quickly create a new Gist – add my code snippet and some tags to categorise and then sync back to the Gist server on GitHub, if you are looking for code snippet management I recommend looking at Lepton 🙂