Github Desktop

Github released a neat GUI for managing local repositories with git called Github Desktop. It's experimental but in a pretty functional state if you choose to use it, it can be a great learning tool if you're new to contributing to open-source code. With that being said, if you want to do more advanced or technical stuff, you'll probably want to switch over to using the git command line tool in the future as it offers much more functionality.

Easy, just go to Github Desktop's download page and follow their instructions.

Github Desktop does not official support any Linux-based distributions, but a community fork has been released at Shiftkey's Github Desktop repository. The readme contains the most up-to-date installation instructions for most major distributions.

After launching Github Desktop for the first time, you should sign into your Github account. In case the dialogue didn't automatically appear, you can do this by going to File → Options → Accounts and clicking Sign in in the “Github.com” section.

Once signed in, it should look like this:

Go to File → Clone repository…. This will open up a dialogue window:

If you've already forked the project, great! Just click it here and clone it, choosing to contribute to the parent project. Otherwise, click on URL at the top to switch to another screen.

Enter the URL of the repository you want to clone. Here, I will be copying the batocera-bezels repository, but the process is identical for batocera.linux as well. This is what it should look like:

Select your desired folder and click Clone. Please wait patiently while the repository is downloaded to your computer.

Nice! Now we have the repository on our computer. The default branch is master. In order to make our changes, we must first create a new branch. Click on the Current branch at the top, then click New branch:

It's useful to give the branch a meaningful, one-or-two word name. I'm intending on making edits to the readme file, so I'm going to name my branch readme.

Now this branch is stored locally on our computer, but it doesn't exist on the online remote repository. To fix that, click Publish branch in the main section:

But you'll notice that this will partially fail as you don't have write access to the Batocera-owned repository! For this reason, we

Github Desktop is still in an experimental state and sometimes issues with usage crop up. Their documentation should answer most basic questions.

Try resetting your username and authentication token by going to File → Options → Accounts → Sign Out, then signing in again.

Refer to Shiftkey's Known Issues page to see if there's a known workaround. There is also a similar page on Github Desktop's official documentation. Unfortunately Batocera itself cannot offer much support for using Github Desktop; if you're having too many issues with Github Desktop it's suggested to switch over to using the git command line tool instead.