Github wikis are git repos

Posted 2024-01-10

Recently, I have been cloning repos after repos locally into my machine. These are mostly sources of open source projects that I adapt to using daily and those that I really like. I was a big fan of package managers (don't get me wrong, I still am). However since late, I have had no good access to the internet. Thus if I wanted to learn about the software I installed using my package manager and, for some reason, either man page does not exist or it exceptionally lacks content or it recommends that I read the online documentation, I will have to resort to reading whatever the software chooses to bundle with the binary when installed. Inspecting /usr/local/share will give you an idea that most software developers bundle sane extras: readme, contrib/, extra/, etc. Most of the time, these files and directories suffice. But nothing beats the source code itself when one wish to know more how the very software works. Plus, younger developers tend to use the built-in wiki feature of whatever git platform they are using rather than just put them in the repo itself (looking at you, kakoune and lf).

Sourcehut leverages git-branch to surface wiki content in their website. Unlike Github's, the wiki repos of projects on Sourcehut are not physically separate from the project source itself. That is, cloning the project will give you the entire package. It's a one-liner.

But lots of projects are on Github so I still have to write this thing.

Thankfully, Github wikis are also git repos so we can clone them. Not sweeter as Sourcehut's though: we still need to clone two separate repos to get the entire package. Say, the project is hosted at https://github.com/user/repo, it is well-known that this url just needs to be appended with.git and the source is ready to be cloned. But it is not so well-known (I think; at least for me; it's just me really, I'm sorry), that one just appends this url with .wiki.git and you're good to go. For verbosity, such is https://github.com/user/repo.wiki.git.

Alright, done. I will now read kakoune's wiki which mostly are configuration tips and tricks. The local documentation that is built-in via :doc is very rich; just needed the magic tricks they suggest but are not in the standard documentation.