kryndex / lovely-forks

💚 🍴 Show notable forks of Github repositories under their names.

Lovely forks

• Firefox addon
• SeaMonkey addon
• Chrome Web Store

An addon to help you notice notable forks of a Github project.

Sometimes on Github, projects are abandoned by the original authors and the development continues on a fork. However, the original repository is seldom updated to inform newcomers of that fact. I have often wasted effort on making a pull-request or installing old buggy versions of projects when the community had already moved to a fork.

To make matters worse, the old projects usually have higher search-engine traffic and a lot more stars than the forks. This makes the forks even harder to find. This addon tries to remedy that by adding a subscript under the name of the repository on the Github page of the project with a link to the most notable fork (i.e. the fork with the most stars and at least one star), if such a fork exists.

Also, if the fork is more recent than the upstream, a flame icon is shown next to it. These are called flamey forks as suggested by Mottie.

Screenshots

The tipsy plugin hasn't been updated since 2012 and there is a community supported fork which has merged in all the PRs. However, the alternative only has 27 stars versus the 1,888 stars of the original project (at the time of writing):

Similarly, the project slate was last updated in 2013 and has about 5,000 stars. The currently active fork only has 185 stars (at the time of writing):

In some cases, a new flavour of the project might become visible, like an internationalized fork (Semantic-UI-pt-br is Semantic-UI in a different language):

Or provides new features (vim-fugitive provides git integration for vim, vim-mercenary provides Mercurial integration):

Acknowledgements

This project uses icons made by Freepik and Dave Gandy from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC BY 3.0.

bfred-it has contributed to improving the look and feel of the extension considerably.

izuzak from Github was instrumental in helping me with bug fixing and suggesting compare API for improving the heuristic to determine if a fork is more recent than the upstream repository.