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City guide
Switch to City in the toolbar. The city is laid out from the repository's folder tree at human scale, so a large repository is a large city.
Reading the city
| You see | It means |
|---|---|
| A district (big block, name floating above its tallest tower) | A top-level folder |
| A block inside it, separated by streets | A nested folder; deeper folders have narrower streets |
| A building | A file |
| Building footprint | Lines of code |
| Building height | Complexity (branching) |
| Lit windows | Definitions: more functions and classes, more lights on |
| Building colour | Semantic layer (application, tests, vendor, …), switchable palette |
| Name on the roof and wall | The file name |
| Green street sign sticking out at a corner | The folder that block belongs to; each corner of an intersection names its own folder |
| Smoke | The file has open medium/low security alerts |
| Fire and smoke | The file has an open critical/high security alert |
| Yellow tape rising across the walls | Dependabot alert (on the manifest file) |
| Red tape falling across the walls | Code scanning alert |
| Light beam into the sky | A search result |
| Lit doorway | The building's door: facing the street, or a back door onto an alley for files in the middle of a folder |
| Streetlights with pools of light | The edges of each folder: lights stand on its boundary, at every corner and every 20 m or so |
| Bins, benches, trees, hydrants, post boxes | Street furniture on the folder's pavement. Purely for atmosphere |
| Cars | Traffic circling the blocks inside each folder, on its grey streets (never on the black ground between districts). They drive on the right and stop for you if you stand in their lane. Purely for atmosphere |
| Cyan chevrons on the road | Route to a file the selected file imports (amber if the import was inferred) |
| Pulsing magenta dashes on the road | Route from a file that imports the selected file |
| Arcs in the sky | The same import relationships, as the crow flies |
| Green figures | Residents. Click one (or aim the crosshair and press E) and they stop, glow pink with their name overhead, and the sidebar shows their resident ID card: name, sex, age, occupation, employer, eye and hair colour, blood type. The same resident is always the same person. |
| Wall with posters | The city limits, with a few facts about the codebase pasted on |
Getting around
Helicopter (1): drag to orbit, Shift+drag (or right-drag) to pan, scroll to zoom.
Double-click a building to fly to it, or double-click a street to drop down and walk.
Walk (2): click the map to capture the mouse and look around, WASD to move, Shift to run,
Esc to release the mouse. The crosshair names the building ahead. Press E (or click) to open
it in the sidebar. Walk right up to a building and its source code appears on the wall. You can't
walk through buildings or out past the city wall.
Fly (3): like walking, but Space and C climb and descend, and moving follows where you
look.
Touch: left thumb is a joystick, right thumb looks around, pinch zooms (or climbs when flying).
Minimap: click it to jump there. It shows your heading, the city wall, security alerts and the selected file's routes.
Following dependencies
Select a file (click it, search for it, or pick it from the sidebar). Routes appear on the streets to everything it imports and from everything that imports it. Every route leaves through the building's door, follows the alley to the street if it's a back door, and goes in through the other building's door. Alley stretches are drawn thinner. With a file selected, switching to Walk puts you at its door facing along the first route: follow the arrows.
Tour and links
- Tour (
T): flies over the six largest districts with captions, and stops as soon as you touch anything. - Copy link: copies a URL with the repository, view, camera position and selected file. Links work for GitHub repositories only.
Opening a shared link:
- Repository already open in this tab: you fly straight to the spot, and the file is selected.
- Repository not loaded here: a card says it's being pulled from GitHub and indexed. Once it's built, you're flown to the saved camera position and the file is selected.
- Private repository you can't access (not signed in on this device, or your GitHub access has expired): you get a warning with a Sign in with GitHub button. After signing in, the link carries on by itself to the shared spot.
- Private repository the GitHub App can't see: the warning offers Grant repository access instead.
Settings
The gear opens settings: landscape palette, source text on tiles, city residents (they keep
the city animating, so switch them off on slow machines) and a frame-rate monitor. The sidebar
folds away with the tab on its left edge, or [.