What is the difference between GitHub and gist?

Question

What is the purpose of gist and how is it different from regular code sharing/maintaining using GitHub?

Answer 1

GISTS The Gist is an outstanding service provided by GitHub. Using this service, you can share your work publically or privately. You can share a single file, articles, full applications or source code etc.

The GitHub is much more than just Gists. It provides immense services to group together a project or programs digital resources in a centralized location called repository and share among stakeholder. The GitHub repository will hold or maintain the multiple version of the files or history of changes and you can retrieve a specific version of a file when you want. Whereas gist will create each post as a new repository and will maintain the history of the file.

Answer 2

You can access Gist by visiting the following url gist.github.com. Alternatively you can access it from within your Github account (after logging in) as shown in the picture below:

 

Github: A hosting service that houses a web-based git repository. It includes all the fucntionality of git with additional features added in.

 

Gist: Is an additional feature added to github to allow the sharing of code snippets, notes, to do lists and more. You can save your Gists as secret or public. Secret Gists are hidden from search engines but visible to anyone you share the url with.

For example. If you wanted to write a private to-do list. You could write one using Github Markdown as follows:

NB: It is important to preserve the whitespace as shown above between the dash and brackets. It is also important that you save the file with the extension .md because we want the markdown to format properly. Remember to save this Gist as secret if you do not want others to see it.

 

The end result looks like the image below. The checkboxes are clickable because we saved this Gist with the extension .md

Answer 3

My personal understanding or to say my personal usage of Gist and Github is:

• Github

A big project work. If you wanna build website, develop mobile or web application or do your assignment with your teammates of course use github.

• Gist

more like a memo. for example you can write the implementation of a small feature and share it to your blog or write down what you think about the project and share it with your teammates. Just like what the above answers said, gist is used for more like code snippet thing. So normally if you work on a project you use github.

Answer 4

The main differences between github and gists are in terms of number of features and user interface:

One is designed with a great number of features and flexibility in mind, which is a good fit for both small and very big projects, while gists are only a good fit for very small projects.

For example, gists do support multi-files, but the interface is very simple, and they're limited in features, so they don't even have a file browser, nor issues, pull requests or wiki. If you dont need to have that, gists are very nice and more discrete. Like the comments, instead of answers, in SO.

Note: Thanks to @Qwerty for the suggestion of making my comment a real answer.

Answer 5

“Gists are actually Git repositories, which means that you can fork or clone any gist, even if you aren't the original author. You can also view a gist's full commit history, including diffs.”

→ check out the official github documentation

So the key difference is, that they are single files.

Oh, and: gists can be “secret” (as in: private url) also without being a paying github customer, if I understand correctly...

Answer 6

My Personal View of Gist and GitHub:

Gist: Gist is a simple way to share code snippets and pastes with others. It is used when you need to share a sample piece of code or technique with your co-workers or friends.

And

GitHub GitHub, on the other hand, provides a platform to share an entire project as a repo among a team(private repo) or to the whole world(public repo).

Both Will log version details.