The Raw, Blame, and History buttons

Now that we have explored how GitHub sees branches, let's take a look at some other Git functionalities that GitHub provides.

The Raw, Blame, and History buttons appear when viewing a single file of a repository. For example, let's visit the README.md file by clicking on it:

The Raw button, like the name suggests, opens the file in a raw form, meaning that any HTML formatting disappears. This is particularly useful when you want to download a single file. You will notice that many guides on the internet use this raw file format when they tell you to download something using command-line tools, such as wget or curl. If you have ever tried to download a file from GitHub and all you got was an HTML file, remember the usage of raw.

The Blame button makes use of Git's blame function. Basically, for each line of a file, Git informs you about who modified that line and when that line was modified. If you want to know more, visit https://git-scm.com/docs/git-blame.

In order to properly see how that works, I will not use our previously created README.md file, since there is not much information there to see how GitHub uses this Git function. Instead, I will use a file from another repository with more commits. Take, for example, https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blame/master/app/models/ability.rb, as shown in the following screenshot:

Compared to invoking git blame in the terminal, you can feel the superiority of GitHub's feature. Every line of code is annotated so you can see when and what commit changed a particular line of the file and who changed it. There is also the nice little feature of hotness: Older commits get a brown line whereas newer ones are colored yellow.

Finally, the History button is nothing more than what git log does for a particular file.