I maintain
SumatraPDF on GitHub. People fork it and make their own changes. I want to know which forks are active and what they’re working on.
It’s hard to see active forks at a glance. Panning and zooming the UI is slow and fiddly. I just want a sorted list of forks with actual changes.
What it does
It uses the GitHub API to find forks that have ahead commits (changes not in upstream) from the last year.
For each active branch it prints:
- a link to the branch on GitHub
- short sha, author, relative date, first line of commit message
Forks are sorted by most recent activity, oldest first. Commits within a branch are oldest first.
It compares each fork branch against the matching upstream branch (e.g. rel3.6working vs rel3.6working), not always master. That way you only see commits unique to the fork.
How to run it
Download the script:
curl -O https://gist.githubusercontent.com/kjk/71a7679dd408d52bc612cdf5eecace58/raw/7d7f605dde6b739424e5190a79e3988477312e74/github-active-forks.ts
You need
Bun and the
GitHub CLI logged in (
gh auth login). Or set
GITHUB_TOKEN.
Run it on any repo as owner/repo:
bun github-active-forks.ts sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf
Progress goes to stderr; results go to stdout, so you can redirect to a file:
bun github-active-forks.ts sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf > forks.txt
Example output
Excerpt from running on SumatraPDF (74 forks with ahead commits):
https://github.com/wackget/sumatrapdf-Feldherren-version/tree/single-page-fit-scrollbar (289d ago)
c53a51d wackget 294d ago Added scrollbar usable in Fit a Single Page display mode.
f927640 wackget 294d ago scrollbar in single page mode now obeys the hideScrollbars setting.
7f57861 wackget 288d ago improved scrolling speed when zoomed in, in non-continuous single-page view.
https://github.com/xyzzyx99/sumatrapdf/tree/rel3.6working (5d ago)
c8d1f7b xyzzyx99 13d ago Add GitHub Actions workflow for building project
8a92547 xyzzyx99 13d ago Fix bugs, revert using version 3.6
1f27324 xyzzyx99 13d ago Save and restore CHM scroll position
24e7974 xyzzyx99 6d ago Preserve current CHM URL across tab restore
30b1cb4 xyzzyx99 5d ago Update README with new bug fixes and formatting
https://github.com/lsq/sumatrapdf/tree/dev (today)
72d7069 lsq 11d ago feat: support share file via socket
a1fc427 lsq 10d ago feat: open home page
938bc07 lsq today add localsend v2.1 api support
Much easier to scan than the Network graph.
