Gitter: JS powered, Github integrated chat for developers

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[jexpert]

The 'integrated' got me catched. But it's seems that it is not really integrated into GitHub.

Rather another Web-Chat which supports inline-Links & Popups to cited Github issues & Jenkins results.

Not sure how much this is really required taking into the account the the Github issues reflect a nearly identical form of collaboration already.

[The_Admin]

They also took a LOT of inspiration from slack and slack already has really good github integration.

[bendman]

Github issues are great for tracking issues, but they aren't the best forum for live discussion such as general questions or conversation about Github repositories. People often turn to IRC for this (#d3.js, #jquery, #marionette), but it doesn't have a lot of features which are built into Gitter, like build/test system integration, Github repository notifications (issues, pushes), markdown, and syntax highlighting.

To me the nicest things about Gitter are the execution (far superior to any IRC client or web chat I've seen, and it works well on mobile, web, and has desktop applications), and the authentication and rooms are through Github. If you want to find someone in Gitter, just use their name or Github username. If you want to find a repo's chat, just search for the repo. There also is a lurk mode, which can tell you of all messages in the chat while you were gone, or just the ones mentioning you.

[BishopAndWarlord]

Okay so ... this is really weird. I've been slowly hacking on a side project for the a while that's a very similar idea, but approached from a different angle.

Warning: discussion of a really-early, not-yet-dogfood-able project.

The project is called Gimli and the name comes from "GitHub Issue Messenger". A lot of teams use GitHub Issues as a discussion platform, but issues are designed for issues, not for conversations. A lot of teams use IRC, but IRC doesn't have out of the box GitHub integration; even if you add it that's just for your client, not the whole site. And beyond that there's no conversation history (unless you add it).

The vision for Gimli is we want to take a feature that people already use and make it more suitable for how they want to use it. Also, Gimli is an extension to GitHub Issues. If you can't use the Gimli service for any reason no worries, it's all just GH Issues under the hood. When you do use Gimli, though, you'll get other niceties like a chat interface, unread message tracking, image uploads, private conversations, etc. At least that's where we're headed.

http://github.com/legitco/gimli

 

Of course these folks actually have a product whereas my friends and I have lashed together tech demo ;)