GitHub/CLI/Q/What's the most idiomatic way to use gh search repos while also displaying primary language and number of stars in a table?

• What's the most idiomatic way to use gh search repos while also displaying primary language and number of stars in a table?

  • AI Answer

    • AI/Response
      • Short answer: use --json fullName,language,stargazersCount with --template and gh's tablerow/tablerender extensions to Go/StdLib/text/template — no jq required.
      • bash

        gh search repos "your query" \
          --sort stars \
          --limit 30 \
          --json fullName,language,stargazersCount \
          --template '{{tablerow "REPO" "LANGUAGE" "STARS"}}{{range .}}{{tablerow .fullName .language .stargazersCount}}{{end}}{{tablerender}}'

      • {{tablerender}} at the end is required — omitting it skips column padding/alignment. tablerow/tablerender are gh-specific additions; run gh help formatting for the full reference.
      • Field name gotchas (REST search API naming differs from GraphQL):
        • stargazersCount (plural, with s) — not stargazerCount
        • language (plain string, "" when undetected) — not primaryLanguage
        • fullName ("owner/repo") — not nameWithOwner
      • --sort stars is not the default — without it results sort by best-match relevance.
      • --limit caps at 100 per invocation; no native pagination beyond that.
      • jq alternative (useful for downstream processing or null-guarding):
        • bash

          gh search repos "your query" --sort stars --limit 30 \
            --json fullName,language,stargazersCount \
            | jq -r '["REPO","LANGUAGE","STARS"],
                (.[] | [.fullName, (if .language == "" then "(none)" else .language end), (.stargazersCount | tostring)])
                | @tsv' \
            | column -t

      • See gh search repos — GitHub CLI Manual and cli/cli discussion #8556.