GitHub URL Tricks: 14 Secrets Hiding in Your Address Bar

Open any repo, click into the address bar, and paste codewiki.google/ right before github.com.

github.com/owner/repo becomes codewiki.google/github.com/owner/repo

Boom. Code Wiki is Google's own tool. Gemini reads the whole repo and writes you a full overview of it, section by section, with diagrams.

Now tap Chat in the top corner. That's a custom AI chat for that repo, and you can ask it anything about the code.

One catch. Google only builds these for popular open source repos, so a small or brand new repo gives you a 404. If that happens, use DeepWiki, which is number 6 on this page.

Copy everything after github.com/ in the URL. That's the owner/repo part.

Paste it into Star History and press enter.

You get a full chart showing the stars that repo has received over time. You can see the exact month a project took off.

What's even cooler is you can add a second repo to the same box. It draws both lines on one chart, so you can compare them. Try vercel/next.js against nuxt/nuxt.

It also gives you the chart as an image or a link you can share. If it ever asks for a GitHub token, that's GitHub's rate limit kicking in. Wait a bit and try again.

github.com/owner/repo becomes gitdiagram.com/owner/repo

All you need to do is swap the word hub for diagram.

GitDiagram gives you a fully interactive diagram of the codebase, mapped out into parts with arrows showing how they connect. You can zoom in and export it.

This is the fastest way to understand a repo you've never opened.

Go to any GitHub repo and press . on your keyboard.

Boom. A fully interactive VS Code opens right in your browser with the whole repo loaded. No download and no install.

Now press Ctrl + P, or Cmd + P on a Mac. A file search opens. Type any file name and you jump to it immediately.

If nothing happens, click an empty spot on the page first. The key does nothing while your cursor is in a text box. If you have no keyboard handy, change github.com to github.dev in the address bar and the same editor opens.

Open any file on GitHub. In the address bar, change github.com to github.githistory.xyz.

github.com/owner/repo/blob/main/README.md becomes github.githistory.xyz/owner/repo/blob/main/README.md

Boom. Git History is a time machine for that file. You get every version it ever had, with who changed it and when, and the changes animate in as you move through them.

Try it on a README and watch a project grow up.

github.com/owner/repo becomes deepwiki.com/owner/repo

DeepWiki does the same job as Code Wiki. It reads the repo and writes it a full wiki, with the architecture explained page by page.

The difference is coverage. It has small repos that Code Wiki gives a 404 on. So try Code Wiki first, and if you hit the 404, swap to this one.

This one is for Jupyter notebooks, which is any file ending in .ipynb. Type tocolab right after github in the URL.

github.com/owner/repo/blob/main/notebook.ipynb becomes githubtocolab.com/owner/repo/blob/main/notebook.ipynb

The notebook opens in Google Colab, ready to run on Google's computers. You don't install Python or anything else.

github.com/owner/repo becomes gittodoc.com/owner/repo

Gittodoc lays the project out as a timeline. When it started, the features that landed, the releases, the big rewrites.

Now you get the story of a project in one scroll instead of reading hundreds of commits.

Go to githubunwrapped.com/USERNAME with your own username on the end.

GitHub Unwrapped turns your year on GitHub into a recap you can download and share. It works on any public profile, so you can unwrap anybody.

Paste this into the address bar and put any username on the end.

github-readme-stats.vercel.app/api?username=USERNAME

You get a stats card for that account. Total stars, commits, pull requests, and a letter grade for the whole profile. It comes from GitHub Readme Stats.

The card is an image, so you can also drop it straight into your own profile README.

ghloc.dev/owner/repo

ghloc counts the lines of code in any public repo and breaks them down by language and by folder. You can see how big a project really is and where the weight sits.

profile-summary-for-github.com/user/USERNAME

Profile Summary for GitHub builds a page of charts for any account. Repos per language, stars per language, commits per language, plus the top ten repos by commits and by stars.

It's a fast way to see what somebody actually works on.

When you open an HTML file on GitHub, you only see the code. Paste htmlpreview.github.io/? in front of the file's full URL and the page runs live instead.

htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/owner/repo/blob/main/index.html

That's HTML Preview. Now you can try somebody's demo page without downloading anything.

These two are GitHub's own.

Type repo.new into the address bar and you land straight on the new repository page. Type gist.new and you get a new gist, which is GitHub's quick way to save and share a snippet.

No menus and no clicking around.

New repo you've never seen: Code Wiki, or DeepWiki if you hit the 404.

You want to see the shape of the code: GitDiagram.

You want to read or search the files: press period.

You want to know if a project is growing or dying: Star History.

You want to know how a file got the way it is: Git History.

Start with the period key. It's been sitting in GitHub the whole time.

If you want more in this direction, my other GitHub list has the swap that turns a repo into one file your AI can read, the one that plugs a repo straight into Claude, and the hidden URL endings.