We just wrapped up our last conference of 2025 in Cologne. While the year has come to a close, we're already looking ahead to what's next. At Text Control, we start planning for the upcoming conference season early by design.

Explore C# 14's powerful features in .NET 10! Boost productivity with extension members, extension operators, field keyword, null-conditional assignment, and more. Write cleaner, safer, and faster code!

As a developer, you have to take control of your projects every day. Whether it is a company repository, an open source project you maintain or collaborate on, or a simple pet project.

Gaining control over your projects often depends on the platform you're working with. While there are many options available, such as Atlassian and GitLab, today I will focus on using GitHub as the platform of choice. Let me guide you through how you can effectively manage your projects on GitHub.

I’ll talk about the GitHub one because that is where I’m working on.

For me, checking the status of my PRs is essential in my daily work. On average, I spend about one or two hours a day tracking down failing CI checks and keeping my PRs in sync with the main branch, or reviewing other PRs.

To do that, I used to use the GitHub website on my PRs page. This page is good; you can find all your PRs, including those where your teammates are requesting a review. You can check whether your PR has reviews and whether the CI passes.

Here you can see my PRs at this specific moment.

As you can see, you can immediately receive information about the PRs, the number of comments, and more.

I used this page for a while because it is a perfect way to check all the work across many repositories, but it has a small problem: to check the page, I have to switch between VSCode and the browser during my job. This constant switching might seem trivial, but research suggests it takes an average of 23 seconds to return to a productive state after such a context switch. In the fast-paced developer environment, these seconds add up, potentially impacting overall efficiency and output.

So, I decided to search for another solution that would let me have the same information across the projects without leaving my VSCode instance.

The first useful extensions to the migration

GitHub Pull Requests was the first extension I started to test. This extension enables checking all PRs in the current repository I’m working on. I can see my open PRs and my teammates' open PRs. From a VSCode panel, I can check the status of a PR or review another one.

This extension enables us to open a PR directly from VSCode without using the GitHub website, reducing the need to switch context between the editor and the GitHub website.

Here is a picture of the extension

As you can see, in the left panel, we can control PRs and Issues. By clicking the PR, we can view its home page. By clicking the arrow icon that appears when you hover over the PR, you can go to the Review mode and add comments or suggestions to that PR.

That extension has improved my DX experience, especially in PR creation and review, but, as you can see, it works only on the open repository, which is a limitation, since I cannot see if in other projects something or someone is blocked by my work, or it’s waiting for a review or something else.

The Final Solution

While browsing the web, I came across a feature of GitKraken called Launchpad. This feature enables us to get a big-picture view of all issues and PRs where we are the creator or a follower. If you don’t know GitKraken, it is a Git client with an awesome UI for managing your repositories. You can use it as a desktop app, website, editor extension (GitLens), or the CLI. They have also released an MCP server in the last period to manage your repository through an LLM.

As you can imagine, I use the GitLens extension, which has a panel that lets me see everything across my repositories.

Spoiler: I use it with GitHub, but you can also use it with Bitbucket and GitLab. It can also combine data across different platforms.

In this panel, there are different groups where you can find your PRs that meet that status. If you click the PR, you will see a pop-up that lets you get more info or jump into the repository if you have already set it up on your machine.

As you can see, just using these two extensions, I reduced the number of switches between my lovely VSCode and the GitHub website. In my editor, I already have control over all my repositories, and with the correct panel, I can do most of my work directly in the editor.

Before closing, I’d like to give you another extension that reduces the need to switch between the editor and the GitHub website. This extension is the GitHub Actions one. This extension lets you check the status of actions directly in the editor, without jumping to GitHub to search for them.

Conclusion

It’s time to wrap up this article.

At first, I showed how I used to check my current work across projects on GitHub, but eventually it became a pain point because switching between the editor and the browser was annoying.

Then I moved to the GitHub Pull Requests extension, which enables me to open, review, and check PRs and Issues in the current open repository.

Lastly, I talked about the GitLens Launchpad, which, through a panel in the editor, provides a big-picture view of all the PRs across the repositories I’m working on and helps me reduce switching between the editor and GitHub during my daily work.

If you want to use the GitLens Launchpad, it is a PRO feature that requires a valid GitKraken license. To buy one, check this link.

That’s it for this article. I hope this feature can also improve your daily DX, and see you in the following articles.

Bye bye 👋

Ryan welcomes Anil Dash, writer and former Stack Overflow board member, back to the show to discuss how AI is not a magical technology, but rather the normal next step in computing’s evolution. They explore the importance of democratizing access to technology, the unique challenges that LLMs’ non-determinism poses, and how developers can keep Stack Overflow’s ethos of community alive in a world of AI.

The release train never ends. In this latest version there are a couple of key features which are laying the ground work for the next bigger. The three big features are:

1. Calculation Pane in the Edit Text Window
2. Regular Expression (RegEx) Manager
3. Zooming on the Fullscreen Grab

Something I’ve wanted in Text Grab for awhile now is the ability to do basic math operations. I loved this as a tool in OneNote and wanted to do even more with updating, aggregation and variable names. Another major inspiration for this feature was the excellent Mac app, Soulver: https://soulver.app/

In addition to wanting to be able to perform calculations, I’ve wanted the ability to save and recall RegExes quickly and easily. Now starting from the Find and Replace dialog, you can open the RegEx manager and select from the starting expressions, modify them, and make your own! These will be popping up in more places so keep an eye out for future releases!

Finally, when selecting an area on the screen from the Fullscreen Grab a more precise selection usually means less clean up work. So now you can zoom in by scrolling the mouse wheel or pinching and zooming when the Fullscreen Grab is active! This makes it easier to precisely select exactly what you’re looking to grab!

The next major features coming to Text Grab will be centered around how to make getting the value out of text automatically with fewer steps and more speed! If there is anything about Text Grab you’d like to change or improve, head over to the GitHub and open an issue, I’m very active in there! https://github.com/TheJoeFin/Text-Grab

Happy Text Grabbing!

Joe

The recent software supply chain attacks proof again that having insights in own project dependencies is crucial. This is where GitHub's dependency graph can help. It maps every direct and transitive dependency in your project, giving you the visibility you need to understand, secure, and manage your software supply chain.

What is the Dependency Graph?

The dependency graph is a summary of the manifest and lock files stored in a repository, showing which packages depend on what, helping you identify risks, prioritize security fixes, and keep track of your project's true footprint.

For each repository, the dependency graph shows:

• Dependencies: The ecosystems and packages your project relies on
• Version information: What versions you're using
• License details: The licensing terms of your dependencies
• Vulnerability status: Whether any dependencies have known security issues
• Transitive paths: For ecosystems that support it, you can see the entire chain that brought in each dependency

Why enable the dependency graph?

When vulnerabilities are discovered in open source packages, they ripple downstream through all projects that depend on them. Without visibility into your dependency tree, you can't take timely action to protect your project.

The dependency graph also unlocks other GitHub security features:

• Dependabot alerts: Get notified when vulnerabilities are found in your dependencies
• Dependency review: Understand the security impact of dependency changes in pull requests
• SBOM export: Generate a Software Bill of Materials for compliance and auditing

How to enable it?

For your public repositories, You don't need to do anything—it's already enabled for you. The dependency graph is available for public repositories by default.

If you have private repositories, a repository administrator can enable it manually:

Step 1: Navigate to Repository Settings

Go to your repository on GitHub and click on Settings (if you don't see the Settings tab, use the dropdown menu to access it).

Step 2: Access Security Settings

In the left sidebar, find the Security section and click on Code security and analysis (or Advanced Security depending on your view).

 

Step 3: Enable the Dependency Graph

Read the message about granting GitHub read-only access to repository data, then click Enable next to "Dependency Graph".

 

Step 4: Wait for Processing

When first enabled, any manifest and lock files for supported ecosystems are parsed immediately. The graph is usually populated within minutes, though this may take longer for repositories with many dependencies.

Viewing your dependency graph

After enabling, you can explore your dependencies by:

• Going to your repository's Insights tab

• Clicking Dependency graph in the left sidebar

 

• Browsing the list of dependencies, which automatically sorts vulnerable packages to the top

 

• Clicking on any dependency to see details like version, license, and vulnerabilities

 

• Using "Show paths" for transitive dependencies to understand how they entered your project

 

Export your dependency graph

One of the  features of the dependency graph is the ability to export it as a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) in the industry-standard SPDX format. SBOMs are increasingly required by regulators, government agencies, and enterprise customers for compliance and transparency purposes.

An SBOM provides a formal, machine-readable inventory of your project's dependencies and associated information such as versions, package identifiers, licenses, transitive paths for package ecosystems with support for transitive dependency labeling, and copyright information.

The export captures the current state of your dependency graph, representing the head of your main branch at the time of export.

The simplest way to generate an SBOM is through GitHub's web interface:

• Navigate to your repository on GitHub
• Click on the Insights tab

• Select Dependency graph from the left sidebar

• On the top right side of the Dependencies tab, click Export SBOM

• A JSON file will automatically download to your browser

More information

About the dependency graph - GitHub Docs