I don't know why anyone would want this. I use github to look at code, the code should be front and center immediately.

Github project URLs are the defacto landing pages for most software components, both public/opensource and private/internal. It's reasonable to lead with the documentation.

Why should Github change the UI just because those people are trying to jam square pegs into round holes? Github is version control first and foremost, not a web host.

Then why does it display the README at all?

Github is a lot of things to many people. A "web host" and a way of publishing information about software is definitely one of the things it is.

I appreciate that "README first" is useful when browsing projects, but it's significantly less useful when actually doing development. The "source code first" approach that GitHub took was one of the major differences with everything that came before it, and in my opinion one of the major reasons for its success.

I think this is a problem solved by github pages. If a project's primary distribution method is github, they should build a Page and link people to that, instead of the repo.

Exactly 0 of the hundreds of projects in my company's git organization have pages. But they have READMEs.

Most software is not popular opensource with a carefully curated web footprint.

It would be nice to have the option, I think, possibly as a URL parameter. This opinion is somewhat self-serving, as I use the GitHub repo front page as the link for all my FOSS projects, because it's super easy to have the documentation track the revision of the code you're looking at. But it does also reflect where I typically look first when looking at other people's projects too.

(What would suit me, I think, is a view that was very much like the current one, but with the files list collapsed (but expandable). So there'd still be all the the tab-like row across the top, and the About column with releases link, and the main area gewgaws like branch dropdown and some indication of the most recent commit. But just with the README front and centre by default.)

If you're sharing a link, you can link to the readme on the page by adding #readme to the end of the URL

You probably use it the way many users do, and I wouldn't be surprised if that happens someday.

But it's mostly just a sign of how almost nobody actually cares about the code now, and just use GitHub as a source of free libraries that may as well not have source available at all.

For others of us, a README is something we may briefly read once or twice when first considering or integrating a project, but the repo's code is where we spend way more time -- evaluating quality, tracing potential bugs, unearhing quirks and overcoming sparse documentation, considering whether a fork is needed, etc

But that's all hokey old greybeard stuff these days.