A Better Reviewer by Justin Warner

Reviewing a pull request on GitHub means a lot of scrolling, a lot of clicking, and a lot of waiting. A Better Reviewer replaces that with an interface built for the handful of things you actually do over and over — and deliberately nothing else.

Open a pull request and a small card appears with "Start a Better Review". Click it and the whole review opens in a fast, purpose-built page. Don't want the card? Collapse it to a pill and it stays out of your way.

FIRST, WHICH ONES ARE ACTUALLY YOURS

There is also a list of the pull requests across the repositories you choose, sorted by what each one needs rather than by when it was touched: waiting on you, blocked on you, ready to merge, waiting on others, quiet, and drafts. Whose turn it is comes from what GitHub already said — a review request, a push since your last look, an unresolved conversation, an approval nobody has acted on — rather than from a rule you have to configure. Search it by title, including closed ones, and open any of them straight into the review page.

WHAT IT DOES

• Comments, with reply and resolve — and editing or deleting your own
• Comments on a line, on a range of lines, or on the file as a whole
• The full pending-review flow — queue comments, then submit them together
• Approve and request changes
• Status checks, including GitHub Actions runs and older commit statuses
• Keyboard navigation throughout
• Per-file viewed state, so you can track your way through a large diff, and a file folds away once you tick it
• Drafts that survive a failed post, so nothing you typed is lost
• Multi-line comments and suggestion authoring
• Noise filtering and diff search
• A file tree you can filter as well as jump through, with an icon per file type
• Expand unchanged context around a hunk
• Scope the diff to one commit, a range of commits, or "changes since my last review"
• A notice when new commits land on the branch while you are reading
• Side by side or unified, and an option to stop counting whitespace-only changes
• Fold away the diffs of generated files — lockfiles, minified bundles, vendored trees — obeying linguist-generated in .gitattributes
• Light and dark, following your system

MORE THAN LINE DIFFS

Some files are not read as lines, so they are not shown as lines. Each of these sits behind a switch on the file's own card, with the plain diff always one press away.

• Markdown rendered, with the changes marked inside the prose rather than beside it, Mermaid diagrams drawn, and a comment you can leave on the paragraph in front of you rather than on the line it came from
• Images side by side, as an onion skin, under a swipe, or by difference
• Jupyter notebooks by cell, or by their outputs
• CSV and TSV as a table, with the changed rows on their own
• JSON, JSONC, YAML and TOML compared by structure, so a reformat or a reordered key stops reading as a change
• Zip archives read as a listing, so a rebuilt archive says which entries really changed rather than that the file differs

READABLE, INCLUDING WHEN THE DEFAULT IS NOT

Seventy-five themes, chosen in Options, and a theme dresses the whole extension rather than only the code — the diff, the page around it, the options page and the card on github.com. The list leads with four palettes built for colour vision deficiency, and includes high-contrast pairs. This exists because Pierre's default palette measures 2.14:1 against a white page in places — below what any text needs, and well below what code read character by character deserves. Left alone, the extension wears GitHub's own colours and follows your system between light and dark; that default is the setting whose contrast has been measured throughout.

YOUR CHOICE OF WHERE IT OPENS

Reviews open in a new tab by default, leaving the pull request where it was. You can switch that to a new window — useful on a second monitor — or to the current tab. There is also an option to open the review automatically whenever you land on a pull request, so the card becomes one less click.

Anything it does not do hands off to GitHub through an "Open in GitHub" button, so you are never stuck.

BRING YOUR OWN TOKEN

The extension has no server and no account. It talks to GitHub using a fine-grained personal access token that you create and control, scoped to only the repositories you choose. The Options page walks you through creating one with exactly the right permissions.

If you want it, the token can be encrypted on your own machine with a passphrase you choose — PBKDF2 key derivation and AES-GCM, with only the ciphertext written to disk, and the decrypted token held in memory for the browser session. This is optional and off by default; you can turn it on when you save the token or long afterwards, and turn it off again. The passphrase is never stored and never transmitted, so it also cannot be recovered.

To be plain about the limit of that: encryption protects the token against anything reading your browser profile off disk. It cannot protect against code running inside the extension itself while it is unlocked. That is true of every browser extension that holds a credential.

PRIVACY

No analytics. No telemetry. No third-party servers. The developer receives no data of any kind. The extension makes network requests to github.com and api.github.com and to nowhere else.

OPEN SOURCE

The full source is at https://github.com/justinmwarner/gh-ext — every claim above can be checked against it.

LIMITS WORTH KNOWING BEFORE YOU INSTALL

• github.com only. GitHub Enterprise is not supported.
• Applying a suggestion is not supported, because GitHub exposes no public endpoint for it. Authoring and rendering suggestions both work.
• The pull request description renders as plain text. The overview panel links to GitHub for the formatted version.