A year of GitHub Desktop on Electron
Developers everywhere are improving their workflows with the Electron-based GitHub Desktop app since we launched it a year ago. If you’re using an older version of Desktop or have never used it, now is a great time to try it out.
We announced the public beta of the open source, Electron-built version of GitHub Desktop a year ago, giving the GitHub community a unified GitHub experience for macOS and Windows. With every release, including the version 1.0 in September 2017, we’ve seen more people using GitHub Desktop to improve their workflows. Less than six months after 1.0 was released, more Desktop users were using the Electron-based version than both the classic versions for Mac and Windows combined.
Since its initial release, we’ve added more features to GitHub Desktop, including support for additional external editors, syntax highlighting support for additional languages, support for adding co-authors to commits, and the ability to view and checkout pull requests from collaborators or forks. Many of these new features were contributions from the open source community.
Starting today, if you’re still using the classic app, you’ll see in-app notifications suggesting an upgrade to the new GitHub Desktop with information on what’s changed. If you are still using GitHub for Mac or GitHub for Windows, or if you’ve never used our desktop apps, try out the new GitHub Desktop.
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