Chris Wanstrath, a GitHub co-founder, publishes small developer tools such as Hub, dotjs, gem-man and repl.
HN commenters link his tools as useful add-ons, for example Hub for pull-request integration, gem-man for gem man pages and repl for git.
Really, the issue is that the news feed is broken.
Absolutely. I coded up a replacement using the GitHub API:
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/10/node-miniapp-minimal-github-dashboard.html
It broke when they changed the API, but by then I had found http://defunkt.io/dotjs, which allows you to execute any code in a ~/.js file for a given domain.
So I put $("div.news").hide(); in my github.com.js and instantly had a more relaxing, comfortable life.
I completely disagree with this part of your post:
Facebook has done a really good job solving the problems of information overload and would provide a good model.
But I do agree with these:
The most important step is to group updates from each project. Right now half of my news feed is comments on a single repository. Those should take up only one or two slots.
The next step is to filter according to some metric of "interestingness."
My advice is do it and share the hack. I think the best way to find trouble spots in your UI is to find out what people are writing hacks to work around.
My question was in fact about features that this command bar does not provide. Part of the ones you mentioned was already available before (like file editing), but simply not in a CLI-related manner. Some of these they could surely add, i.e. whatever can be put in this command bar yet not turning it into terminal.
If you're going to do real job, just do in your real terminal emulator, xterm, rxvt, you name it. What's the point of having GitHub terminal in browser? If you want to do quick'n'dirty fixes/improvements directly from the browser, then it's like asking yourself for troubles, because there is quite higher chance that you'll commit a mistake (even literally speaking) than if you'd be using your own terminal that you work with on a daily basis.
You may want to check a few CLI tools:
https://github.com/defunkt/github-gem
https://github.com/defunkt/hub - http://defunkt.io/hub/
Hacker News' design has a lot of personality and I would never recommend redesigning it (for the same reason I enjoy Craigslist's "design") but making it resolution independent and maybe even responsive sounds like a great idea.
Personally I prefer a slightly larger serif font when reading comments on here which is why I wrote a quick dotjs [1] script that now also replaces the upvote arrow GIF:
Preview: http://cl.ly/I3o0
Script: https://github.com/max/.js/blob/master/news.ycombinator.com.js
[1] http://defunkt.io/dotjs/
This isn't too far from the truth! I make extensive use of dotjs[1] to inject my own CSS rules into web sites that I use frequently. ~65% of what I do is simply hiding useless divs/ads/flash and removing background colors, with the other 35% being mostly typographic tweaks (`line-height` and `font-size` being popular candidates here).
[1]: http://defunkt.io/dotjs/
If I snap the window to take up half my screen, the dumb (un-hideable) sidebar ends up eating most of that screen space.
I wrote a dotjs[1] script[2] that solves exactly this by letting you toggle the sidebar on and off.
[1]: http://defunkt.io/dotjs/
[2]: https://github.com/timothyandrew/.js/blob/master/reddit.com.js
EDIT: Formatting
Have you tried this? http://defunkt.io/hub/
# create a repo for a new project
$ git init
$ git add . && git commit -m "It begins."
$ git create -d "My new thing"
→ (creates a new project on GitHub with the name of current directory)
$ git push -u origin master