Refined GitHub is an MIT-licensed browser extension written in TypeScript that simplifies the GitHub interface and adds useful features, built for developers and teams who spend their working day inside GitHub and want the small missing conveniences fixed without waiting for the platform itself to change.

What it is

Refined GitHub is a browser extension that modifies the GitHub web interface in place. It ships as separate builds for Chrome and other Chromium browsers, for Firefox including Firefox Android, and for Safari on Mac, iOS and iPadOS, and it is published on the Chrome Web Store, Mozilla Add-ons, and the Mac App Store. The source is TypeScript under the MIT licence, and GitHub Enterprise installations are supported as well as github.com. It lives in the browsers and extensions ecosystem, and it also carries a userstyle topic, indicating that some of its presentation work relates to styling the GitHub interface.

The concrete problem it solves is that GitHub's interface leaves out information and controls that heavy users reach for daily. Refined GitHub replaces the unrefined GitHub interface and the manual workarounds people would otherwise perform to recover that information. The maintainers state plainly that they use GitHub a lot, notice many annoyances they would like to fix, and hope GitHub will eventually implement some of these improvements itself, so the extension is in effect a set of patches applied on top of the platform.

Key capabilities

• Makes whitespace characters visible, so indentation defects are spotted directly in the GitHub diff and file views.
• Tells whether the repository being viewed is at its latest version or has unreleased commits, and shows how far behind a pull request head branch is along with its base commit.
• Filters issue and pull request timelines so that every event except comments, or except unresolved comments, can be hidden, and adds one-click subscription to opening and closing events of issues.
• Selects notifications by type and status, replacing one undifferentiated notification stream.
• Adds a button to discard all the changes to a file within a pull request.
• Enables individual features under named flags, including repo-header-info (stars, CI, fork and private status in the repository header), repo-age (repository age in the sidebar), sticky-sidebar (sticky sidebars in repositories, issues and pull requests when they fit the viewport) and github-actions-indicators (workflow status indicators in the workflows sidebar).
• Adds links in context: a link to swap branches in the branch compare view via swap-branches-on-compare, a link to the default branch on directory listings and files, and a link to a user's github.io website from its repository via link-to-github-io.

Who uses it and how

• Individual developers who live in the GitHub web interface all day and want repository context such as stars, CI status and fork state surfaced in the header rather than hunted down.
• Teams running GitHub Enterprise, which enable the extension through the provided webext-permission-toggle flow rather than through a public store listing alone.
• Firefox Android users and Safari users on Mac, iOS and iPadOS, who install from Mozilla Add-ons or the Mac App Store respectively.
• Maintainers of forks, who use show-open-prs-of-forks to see how many of their open pull requests target the original repository.
• Reviewers and triage participants, who use comment-only and unresolved-comment filtering plus notification selection by type and status to cut noise out of busy issues and pull requests.

Getting started

Install the published build for the relevant browser: Chrome Web Store or another Chromium browser, Mozilla Add-ons for Firefox and Firefox Android, or the Mac App Store for Safari on Mac, iOS and iPadOS. For GitHub Enterprise, enable it through the linked webext-permission-toggle page.

How it compares

No comparable paid products or alternative tools are named in the material available for this registry, so Refined GitHub stands alone here. Its MIT licence and client-side packaging mean there is no hosted tier to buy into and no vendor account required.

When to use it — and when not to

There is nothing to operate on the server side: no database, storage or SMTP to run, because the extension executes in the user's own browser. People who do not use the GitHub web interface, or who need organisation-wide administrative enforcement of interface behaviour rather than per-user browser tweaks, should look elsewhere, since the extension is installed and configured per browser by each individual. The honest weaknesses are that it depends on GitHub's own interface remaining compatible, that the maintainers themselves expect GitHub to absorb some of these improvements over time, that it is carried largely by a single maintainer, @fregante, with community sponsorship, and that the repository currently shows 80 open issues.