Please allow the user to change the title of a gist instead of forcing him to create a dummy file just for this

[adriancuadrado]

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According to this StackOverflow post, there is no way to change the title of a gist other than creating a dummy text file that starts with a space or a special character that takes precedence in the ascii table. It doesn't make sense that people have to resort to this kind of hack for something as simple as changing the title of a gist.

It would also be awesome if we could manually change the order in which files appear instead of having to prefix each and every one of them with a number or something like someone said in this StackOverflow post.

[ernstki]

See also https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/13772.

One commenter there made the (good) point that Gists are just repos. Well, repos have READMEs. I'm not in love with GitLab's implementation of snippets, where every snippet has a title and an optional description (basically a built-in README.md), but they certainly don't have this problem.

Having the first file alphabetically show up as the title of the gist (and in search results) is pretty suboptimal. I've lost track of how many times I have to rename files to zz_something to work around this.

I think the solution is just let people check a checkbox for the "default" file for the gist. Then people can stop with hacks like !!README.md and zz_README.md to get either the thing that is the Gist or the README to show up in listings.

[ernstki]

It's almost comical, what happens when you add a .gitattributes to fix the syntax-highlighting for your zz_Makefile (which doesn't seem to work anyway), and now your Gist is called .gitattributes.

Pro Tip: use a Vim or Emacs modeline instead.