Hacker News Reader

It's probably too late to change every tool.

If the main problem is that, when you go look at a project on github or gitlab, you see a long list of config files rather than the code you're looking for, a cleaner solution is for the git sites to show the listing for a /src directory instead of / on the project page.

View on HN

Or hide/collapse dotfiles like the ls command does.

Putting them in .config is something to work toward in the long term, but I like this as an immediate fix. A possible UX could be a single entry at the bottom of the repo root listing with "+ 6 hidden files, click here to show", that then expands out to to reveal the full listing when clicked.

Edit to add— someone suggests this on the linked issue, and it is mentioned as a concern that auto-hiding the files could lead to them being used to conceal malicious code. Not sure how significant of a concern that really is, but it's an interesting angle, anyway.

You can also hide malicious code by putting it in a subdirectory, so I don't agree with their concern.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com