The Best GitHub Productivity Tools

To get the most out of GitHub, it helps to choose the right tools. Developer productivity tools abound, but not all of them are worth adopting to improve your workflow.

You can use the best productivity tools for programmers to enhance almost any part of your development process, including getting focused and delegating tasks. The following software developer productivity tools can help you do these things and quite a bit more.

GitHub productivity tools for scheduling

TrackingTime

Keeping track of the time your team spends actively coding and updating your project in GitHub is always important if you want to simplify the payroll process. However, corralling GitHub logs into a meaningful summary of time spent working is difficult to do in most cases—and practically impossible in many.

TrackingTime makes this entire endeavor much easier by providing a simple extension for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers (like Google Chrome) that tracks time on GitHub and many other platforms. This tool offers a limited free service and an affordable pro option, both of which can be used to manage full timesheets and integrate multiple users with services such as GitHub.

Todo.txt

Managing your daily to-dos is crucial for staying on top of project deadlines. Unfortunately, many to-do tracking tools can be a bit too complicated to be useful for their intended purpose. Todo.txt leverages the simplest filetype available to streamline the process for you.

This tool is essentially a front-end manager for your handy text file that makes it easy to add important details to your tasks, add new tasks, and remove old ones in a snap. There are numerous editors available for every conceivable platform and a command-line interface (CLI) for power users to poke around in.

And it's of course easy to store those files in GitHub.

Software developer productivity tools for focusing

Focusmate

While not directly related to GitHub, Focusmate is a coworking community in the cloud that keeps you accountable for the tasks you have at hand by putting another person in front of you.

The way this setup works is simple: You join a video hangout with another person who wants to be as productive as possible. After you greet one another, you begin posting the tasks you intend to take on, one at a time, and completing them quietly so as not to disturb each other.

Cold Turkey

For those who need a helping hand in keeping their focus on a single objective for a while, web developer productivity tools like Cold Turkey are a turn-key solution. You can block entire domains, specific URLs, search engine keywords, or even the entire internet for specific periods of time.

The pro version of this tool even allows you to block apps that you’d rather not be tempted by and place all blocks on a repeating weekly schedule. For scheduled break time, you can even block your own computer completely.

Programmer productivity tools for coding and committing

searchcode

Whether you’re wondering how a function can be used in a project like yours or where a specific bit of code is located in your project's codebase, searchcode can come in handy. This tool allows you to quickly search more than 10 public code sources for the info you need — including GitHub, Gitlab and Bitbucket.

searchcode brings up results across languages and APIs and can even be limited to a single repository (such as your own) to help you find what you are looking for extremely quickly.

Marker.io

Bug tracking and reporting can be tricky to implement well. Many programmer productivity tools designed to ease the technical burden of moving bug reports to GitHub or your platform of choice can incidentally fumble the report generation part of the process. This discourages users, stakeholders, and team members from making those useful bug reports in the first place.

Marker.io is designed to solve the above fairly simply so you can stay focused on fixing instead of figuring out what report goes where. For web applications and cloud-based projects of all types, this tool facilitates bug report creation and integration with on-screen annotations as well as automatically attached technical details.

Mergify

Mergify makes GitHub merging processes significantly simpler, among many other things. Merging concerns can be a headache to manage manually. Without thoughtful automation, a tidal wave of tedious tasks such as labeling commits, assigning code reviews, queuing up merges, and more are guaranteed to eat away at your day as your project matures.

Simply by using Mergify's automatic merge feature, you can skip the button pressing and mistaken merges. Spell out simple or complex conditions that must be met before each merge, then sit back and let Mergify make it happen on its own.

Get your GitHub workflow in order

Streamlining your GitHub workflow can help your team accomplish significantly more in the same amount of time, all while minimizing mistakes along the way. The software developer productivity tools above can help you do this in record time so you can get back on track with your latest project.

To learn more about Mergify and the many GitHub tasks we can help your team master, get started now with a demo.