Collaborating with Lists

At GitHub, we use lists for collaborating on software development, because lists are a simple and powerful tool for collaborating on anything. That’s why we’re introducing better visualization of list arrangements in our rendered prose diff view.

In Markdown, making a list is incredibly easy. You can make an unordered list by preceding list items with either a * or a -.

* Item
* Item
* Item

Nested lists are very useful for associating supplementary information such as notes to an item. To nest a list, indent the nested items:

* A list item
  * A nested list's first item
  * A nested list's second item
  * A nested list's third item
* Another list item

For example, many teams use issues and pull requests to keep track of what they’re working on right now, and use a Backlog to keep track of features that haven’t been scheduled yet:

Tracking Changes Over Time

Being able to see changes over time gives teams a perspective on the features and requirements that have been added to projects. We can see at a glance when features are added:

Removed:

Or changed:

Whether numbered or not, the order of items is usually significant. Rendered prose diffs show you when items have been moved up or down:

Work together, better

It’s easy to see when list items have been added, removed, changed, or moved, just as it’s easy to review changes to all of your documents in GitHub.

And unlike other products that place your documents in their own “silos,” you can use as much or as little of the GitHub toolset to manage and track your documents. Pull requests, organizations, commits, repos, issues, comments, source diffs, and rendered prose diffs: Everything is available and everything works together with your development tools.

GitHub makes collaborating with lists 1,337% more awesome by tracking and visualizing the changes over time using the same powerful tools your team already uses to manage your code.

Written by

Reg Braithwaite

@raganwald