GitHub introduces Topics to help you discover interesting repositories

GitHub has added a fun new feature to its code project platform to help you classify repositories and find others that you might be interested in.

The new Topics feature lets repo admins add tags to their repositories’ main pages – they’re displayed below the description of each project. You can use as many as you like to label your projects with their purpose, platform, language, community and whatever else you can think of.

Plus, Topics uses machine learning to figure out what your repo is about and suggests tags that it thinks are worth adding. Private repos aren’t analyzed this way, but you can still manually add your own topics and spot them in your search results as long as you’re authorized to access them.

That’s handy for discovering similar projects that you might want to learn from or contribute to. I’m always on the lookout for interesting new text editors, so I followed the ‘editor’ tag from the Atom repo and was pleasantly surprised to find a bunch that seem like they’re worth trying out.