GitHub epitomizes a "culture of shipping" to me. They're slamming feature after feature out the door (multiple features in the same day sometimes - like today). I like BitBucket too but, man, I would not want to be competing against the GitHub team right now. They're just prolific.

I think this is inspired by the fullscreen mode in Wordpress. That's a good thing. Now I wish other places would incorporate this. I'd love a zen mode in Gmail, for instance.

If you're writing an inline comment (in normal mode, not Zen mode) on a commit and accidentally hit escape, your whole comment is lost. I think the biggest improvement to comments github could make would be to not wipe out everything you've written if you hit escape. This feature will help a bit with this, as it given you an extra level before escape will destroy a comment.

It's a little funny that "Zen mode", absolute quietness on screen to focus the mind without any distractions at all, has a little, largely unnecessary widget on screen that you can keep clicking back and forth that lets you change the color scheme.

"Zen" doesn't mean "being in the zone"

Cool feature, though!

I wrote a short blog post [1] on what I found while trying out Github's new zen writing tool. Just using it was enlightening for me if you havn't tried it yet give it a go, or have a look at what I thought of it, then you'll want to give it a go?

  I realised that I wanted to be able to link to this. 
  Not the main github page of my code repository (although I will want to do that too 
  of course) but to this markdown rendered zen mode view of what I want to show them.
  be that code or prose.

[1]: https://github.com/christopherdebeer/zen/blob/master/README....

Submitted to http://theworsthorse.com/category/dharma-burger/

I'd like to see this applied to gists as well.

This is excellent. I wonder if they can open source it so I could use it on my sites :)

Would be nice to have it in fixed when you're editing code. But, then again, if you're using it for editing code, you might need syntax highlighting as well.

Man, my old man's generation probably thinks we're all candy asses.

How long before they offer full blown IDE? Something like Cloud9 IDE could be quite easily integrated - https://c9.io/

Are there any plans to add a keyboard shortcut for this?

This news worthy?

Finally, this was one of the most wanted features for me. Congrats to the team for the amazing work.

Cool! What's the keyboard shortcut to indicate "Exit Zen mode" after I am done writing?

I just found it by accident... "Oh my god!" ;)

Wonderful. I'll be able to finish my books more easily with this feature.