One Tip a Week: Review GitHub PRs Faster with Two Shortcuts

This week’s tip of the week are the keyboard shortcuts , and . on GitHub PR pages.

Big thanks to Gary Ewan Park for this one. It came up in a Slack chat about speeding up pull request reviews.

I already knew about pressing . (period) on a GitHub repo to open GitHub.dev, the browser-based VS Code editor, but I thought it only worked for the default branch on the main repo page. It turns out it also works when you are on a pull request page, and it opens directly into that PR’s branch.

Here’s how it works:

• While viewing a pull request page, press . (period) to open GitHub.dev with the PR branch already checked out.

• Or press , (comma) to open a GitHub Codespace with the PR branch preloaded and ready to run.

When to use which:

• Use GitHub.dev (.) for quick edits, reading code, or leaving comments. It is lightweight and runs entirely in your browser, but you cannot run builds or scripts.

• Use Codespaces (,) when you need a full environment with a terminal so you can build, test, or debug. It is basically VS Code in the cloud.

These shortcuts makes reviewing and editing PRs much faster since you can go straight from viewing the PR to editing it without cloning or switching branches locally.

Quick recap:

• . for GitHub.dev (instant, lightweight editor)

• , for Codespaces (full dev environment)

Try them next time you are reviewing a PR and lemme know what you think!

That’s it! Short and sweet. Until the next one!