Lepton For Mac

GitHub's Gist service is an online code snippet repository designed to make a developer's easier by providing an easy to access, with built-in versioning and SSL encryption for effortlessly creating private entries.

Despite its usefulness, the Github Gist does come with a shortcoming: the lack of a desktop app. This is where Lepton steps in, filling the need for a desktop GitHub Gist client of users who want to avoid using a web browser to manage their code snippets.

Lepton is an Electron-based cross-platform application which helps you to manage and organize your gists with ease, via a streamlined and text-only user interface.

Upon start, Lepton will ask you to enter your GitHub credentials to connect to your account, to download your snippets and to sync all your future edits and gists created locally.

Lepton allows you to create new gists either by clicking on a link within its interface or by using the ⌘ + N hotkey. Subsequently, once you start editing the new snippet, you can add tags using the "#tags:" starting keyword, to make it simpler to organize your gists.

Lepton comes with inbuilt Markdown rendering, a feature which makes it a useful cloud-based Markdown note taking tool, as well as an easy to use renderer for testing syntax when in a hurry.

Lepton also has a built-in search engine designed to resemble macOS' Spotlight feature, that can be summoned using the ⇧ + Space hotkey.

At the moment, when searching for snippets using the inbuilt search, Lepton will only look in the description field. An easy way to circumvent this shortcoming is to try pinpointing a gist using the custom tags you defined when it was created.

As an extra advantage, Lepton features an immersive mode that will enable you to focus on the currently selected gist. The immersive mode can be activated with the ⌘ + I hotkey, and it can be exited using the same shortcut again or by hitting the ESC key on your keyboard.

The only feature Lepton seems to be missing at the time is custom hotkey support, although it would be quite a challenge to devise an appropriate customization dialog that would fit within its current interface.

To sum it all up, Lepton is the tool to go to if you need a desktop-based GitHub Gist client, with support for custom tags for organizing your tags easier and with a streamlined interface that lets you focus on your content instead of hunting down the right button or menu for the current task.