SourceTree for Windows 2.0(blog.sourcetreeapp.com)
blog.sourcetreeapp.com
SourceTree for Windows 2.0
https://blog.sourcetreeapp.com/2017/04/27/sourcetree-for-windows-2-0-new-ui-faster-performance-and-microsoft-git-virtual-file-system-support/
63 comments
I wish I could disagree with any of this, as SourceTree has the potential to be a really good Git client.
SourceTree's design is nice (although it could use some improvement), but there are so many niggling issues that just get in the way. Combine those with frequent application restarts due to unresponsive tools and windows and you have a recipe for finding a better tool.
I recommend Git Extensions.
SourceTree's design is nice (although it could use some improvement), but there are so many niggling issues that just get in the way. Combine those with frequent application restarts due to unresponsive tools and windows and you have a recipe for finding a better tool.
I recommend Git Extensions.
> I have a lot of projects, scrolling through tabs at the top is not good enough
I think you are misunderstanding how the new flow is for repo viewing.
The tab (+) button is the replacement for the sidebar repo list. You are not expected to open every single repo and have them all as a separate tab. You are expected to open a reasonable amount of repos at once, do work with them, and then close them. If you want to look at other repos, you open them via the tab (+) button.
I don't think its that big of a deal to change it like that.
That's not to say this I think this is a perfect app. What I want them to improve is making it a bit nicer when you have more than ~10 repos open at once. The tabs are way too wide and scrolling through them is terrible with the way the scroll buttons work right now.
I think you are misunderstanding how the new flow is for repo viewing.
The tab (+) button is the replacement for the sidebar repo list. You are not expected to open every single repo and have them all as a separate tab. You are expected to open a reasonable amount of repos at once, do work with them, and then close them. If you want to look at other repos, you open them via the tab (+) button.
I don't think its that big of a deal to change it like that.
That's not to say this I think this is a perfect app. What I want them to improve is making it a bit nicer when you have more than ~10 repos open at once. The tabs are way too wide and scrolling through them is terrible with the way the scroll buttons work right now.
Does the (+) button open a file-open prompt, or is it a list of all previously opened projects?
If it's the former, then it's absolutely useless for my use-case, and a great example of removed functionality.
If it's the latter, then they have gone backwards in UX design (for my personal use case) - that is, it is now an additional layer of barrier for me to see and access all my projects, for what benefit? What problem is this solving?
If the only answer to the previous question is something to the effect of "cleaner UI" or "less clutter" then there is a fundamental problem with how they approach updates.
It really sucks that this is even a thing, because I feel bad for shitting on Atlassian so much, when I use Sourcetree almost exclusively, and have for quite a long time.
If it's the former, then it's absolutely useless for my use-case, and a great example of removed functionality.
If it's the latter, then they have gone backwards in UX design (for my personal use case) - that is, it is now an additional layer of barrier for me to see and access all my projects, for what benefit? What problem is this solving?
If the only answer to the previous question is something to the effect of "cleaner UI" or "less clutter" then there is a fundamental problem with how they approach updates.
It really sucks that this is even a thing, because I feel bad for shitting on Atlassian so much, when I use Sourcetree almost exclusively, and have for quite a long time.
I agree that they mangled your use case, but think this is a pretty great improvement for probably >95% of their users.
Most users do have not that many repos and work on only very few a day. The former UI had two ways to switch repos, and to be honest it happened quite often to me that I had selected a repo on the left, but not the tab, and so was looking at the wrong stuff for a few seconds.
So I see your pain, but have to agree with the thinking behind this change.
(Although I think the new repo selection screen is not very pretty, misses functionality [I can see all my folder opened at the same time] and wastes so much space - it should have just been like the old repo list but in a different location)
Most users do have not that many repos and work on only very few a day. The former UI had two ways to switch repos, and to be honest it happened quite often to me that I had selected a repo on the left, but not the tab, and so was looking at the wrong stuff for a few seconds.
So I see your pain, but have to agree with the thinking behind this change.
(Although I think the new repo selection screen is not very pretty, misses functionality [I can see all my folder opened at the same time] and wastes so much space - it should have just been like the old repo list but in a different location)
The (+) button shows you the same list as the repo sidebar did before. That is what you want, and yes, it's 1 additional click now. Not so bad.
This looks promising: https://www.gitkraken.com/
Decent client but $60 / year was a bit too rich for me. May be the right price for other people though.
That said, I wish that SourceTree had a Linux client. People complain about it, but given that it's a better client than GitHub's and it's pretty polished; pretty good for free.
That said, I wish that SourceTree had a Linux client. People complain about it, but given that it's a better client than GitHub's and it's pretty polished; pretty good for free.
The required centralised account kind of annoys me, but only because I'm not clear about what's going to happen with my email or account information.
I gave that a try. It looked neat, but nothing really amazing enough to shell out money when all I really need is tig and the shell.
Alas they've been promising rebase support for a couple of years now. Would love to try it when they do.
Honestly, they’ve been pulling the same crap on the Mac version, too. It’s like they purposely went about crippling their own app and making it worse in every way. Every version that comes out is uglier and has less functionality than before. And of course Atlassian could care less. They completely stopped responding on Twitter and started deleting all negative comments on their SourceTree blog. I have an older version for Mac OS X that I use, which I could never upgrade because all the newer versions are demonstrably worse. I hope it continues to work because there are no other native and non-hybrid/electron GUI clients let. (Tower has less than 50% of SourceTree’s features and the developers seem focused on creating a Windows version instead of adding the missing features to the already existing Mac version).
I think it's worth mentioning that Atlassian does care, which should show in this new version and the time and effort we have put in to make SourceTree faster and more reliable.
One of our goals over the past couple of years was to simplify SourceTree and make it easier for developers to get started with Git. Admittedly we did not always hit the right balance, but you can be sure we care and listen.
We didn't remove the negative comments from our blog, we removed all comments from our blog to minimise the number of channels on which people engage in discussions. Sorry if it created a perception that we don't care, it's quite the opposite.
Cheers, Jens
One of our goals over the past couple of years was to simplify SourceTree and make it easier for developers to get started with Git. Admittedly we did not always hit the right balance, but you can be sure we care and listen.
We didn't remove the negative comments from our blog, we removed all comments from our blog to minimise the number of channels on which people engage in discussions. Sorry if it created a perception that we don't care, it's quite the opposite.
Cheers, Jens
Looks like they opted to go for the "user local" installation approach on Windows, rather than installing per-system in \Program Files. I've seen other tools do this too.
That's correct -- we chose to do this because it allows users to install ST without admin privileges. We use Squirrel, which is an incredible library btw (https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows)
Have they got rid of the treeview of repos? That was a vital feature. I never used the tabs because they didn't all fit on screen, and the tab UI doesn't allow you to distinguish between different repos with the same name. Ironically they seem to have adopted what I considered the worst feature of Git Kraken.
Oh, and it let you see all your repos' status (what branches are checked out) at a glance. This is such a pain. I will definitely need to roll back to the last version.
Totally agree with other commenters - this application suffers from the most "changes that randomly f* up the UI" of any app that I use (because it's still useful despite the havoc the developers inflict on the app)
Totally agree with other commenters - this application suffers from the most "changes that randomly f* up the UI" of any app that I use (because it's still useful despite the havoc the developers inflict on the app)
ST dev for Windows here. How many repo do you typically work with at once? Would it help to show the "ahead/behind" indications in the tab headers?
Dude, you gotta fix the little arrows that let you scroll the tab bar. Each click just scrolls it like 10% of a tab so it takes 10 clicks to move it 1 tab. This is ridiculous.
Personally, I have a 2560x1440 monitor and I keep ST on it fullscreen. I usually have ~7 repos open but sometimes need to open up to 15. I can fit 11 tabs but look at how much wasted space is in each tab: https://www.screencast.com/t/vKrSNe5APy
On the older version of ST, like 1.5 or something, the tabs were only as big as the name of the repo so each tab was much smaller. This worked great.
Alternatively, make the tabs just add extra rows so instead of having a scrolling list, the tab bar grows vertically instead.
Personally, I have a 2560x1440 monitor and I keep ST on it fullscreen. I usually have ~7 repos open but sometimes need to open up to 15. I can fit 11 tabs but look at how much wasted space is in each tab: https://www.screencast.com/t/vKrSNe5APy
On the older version of ST, like 1.5 or something, the tabs were only as big as the name of the repo so each tab was much smaller. This worked great.
Alternatively, make the tabs just add extra rows so instead of having a scrolling list, the tab bar grows vertically instead.
When it will be available for Windows 3.11? SCNR
God I thought it was the source tree of MS Windows 2.x. So disappointed. #grammar
I'm still confused by this. What does ST mean by Windows 2.0?
I believe they mean the software is "SourceTree for Windows", and the software just had its 2.0 release. Probably more reasonably titled "SourceTree 2.0 for Windows".
This may be because their OS X version hasn't reached the same yet. So they have 2, essentially completely separate products with at least mostly separate codebases, "SourceTree for Windows" and "SourceTree for OS X", each with their own versioning.
So it really is "SourceTree for Windows 2.0", not "SourceTree 2.0 for Windows".
So it really is "SourceTree for Windows 2.0", not "SourceTree 2.0 for Windows".
"SourceTree for Windows, version 2.0" would be much better (here, at least. On their webpage it's much less ambiguous of course)
Used to pay for this before it was acquired by Atlassian. Never used it since. Thought I might try, given the major new version number, but...
You will be prompted for your Atlassian account details. You only have to login once to complete your registration.
No thanks.
Be warned, paying users upgrading from 2.x to current 2.3.x will be forced to sign up.
You will be prompted for your Atlassian account details. You only have to login once to complete your registration.
No thanks.
Be warned, paying users upgrading from 2.x to current 2.3.x will be forced to sign up.
And in Atlassian's license, section 12: "You will not publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Products.". Enables trust a lot...
https://www.atlassian.com/legal/customer-agreement
https://www.atlassian.com/legal/customer-agreement
Let me follow up with our legal team to see why that's in there. Sometimes there is a good "legal" reason for these terms that are not quite obvious to the rest of us.
To the earlier comment, we have gotten a lot of feedback in regards to the sign-up to Atlassian Account. The fact is that you always required a license, so you had to sign-up anyway. But we took the license away and streamlined the sign-up into the product (yes, there are issues with people behind firewalls that we will have to address).
Personally, I don't think requiring an account is asking too much for a free product and down the road it will help us to provide a more seamless integration for people who use other Atlassian tools as well.
Cheers, Jens
To the earlier comment, we have gotten a lot of feedback in regards to the sign-up to Atlassian Account. The fact is that you always required a license, so you had to sign-up anyway. But we took the license away and streamlined the sign-up into the product (yes, there are issues with people behind firewalls that we will have to address).
Personally, I don't think requiring an account is asking too much for a free product and down the road it will help us to provide a more seamless integration for people who use other Atlassian tools as well.
Cheers, Jens
I had a license, changed nothing, and your upgrade wants me to go waste 10 minutes to-and-froing to get on some new marketing database. Sorry, not cool. I feel like your company ruined a great product I was very happy with.
Atlassian have become (probably always were) a horrible, customer-hostile company. This is terrible.
Here is a UI/UX comparison of 1.x vs. 2.x:
https://blog.sourcetreeapp.com/2017/01/27/sourcetree-for-win...
Was really disappointed in the UI direction they took in 1.8+, but fortunately they seem to have backtracked a bit (icons now actually have labels and a bit of color again, etc). Giving this a shot and we'll see how I feel in a few days.
Hrm, I'm the opposite - I like icons to have clear, simple shapes. But I like this too.
The problem was they removed _all_ color from all icons in 1.8, made them all gray with pencil-thin lines, and removed all the labels. The icons in 1.6 were perfectly fine - in 1.8, you couldn't tell anything apart. There was a huge thread in the Sourcetree JIRA complaining about this: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREEWIN-4306 .
This seems like a great update to me. Much speedier than 1.x and the removal of the repo sidebar doesn't seem like it actually matters. It's 1 additional click to access your repo list but it seems like a good tradeoff for a bit more horizontal space.
Another positive change is the tab bar now occupies the entire horizontal space so you can fit a few more repos in. But, the tabs are still super wide (much wider than they need to be). This was changed sometime around 1.7 and I hate it. If you have repos with a lot of submodules you tend to have a lot of repos open so it really hurts this use case.
So yeah, please make the tabs less wide so we can have more open!
Another positive change is the tab bar now occupies the entire horizontal space so you can fit a few more repos in. But, the tabs are still super wide (much wider than they need to be). This was changed sometime around 1.7 and I hate it. If you have repos with a lot of submodules you tend to have a lot of repos open so it really hurts this use case.
So yeah, please make the tabs less wide so we can have more open!
It's so much faster. I'm very pleased with the speed improvements. Every time I click on something it's almost instant. Before, not so much. Great job Atlassian!
I like this new version a lot (it's so much faster!) but after having used it all morning, I'm noticing something that I really do not like.
If I click on a changed file to see the diff, the diff text shows up almost immediately, but it's blurry. Then, gradually the blurry text is replaced by sharp text about .5 seconds later. It's really nasty to see it and I feel like it's messing with my eyes and brain.
Is there any way to tweak this behavior? I feel like I would rather just see nothing until it can render it sharply.
If I click on a changed file to see the diff, the diff text shows up almost immediately, but it's blurry. Then, gradually the blurry text is replaced by sharp text about .5 seconds later. It's really nasty to see it and I feel like it's messing with my eyes and brain.
Is there any way to tweak this behavior? I feel like I would rather just see nothing until it can render it sharply.
I don't understand why they don't show the Windows UI on https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/ if they already know I'm using Windows by showing me the "Download for Windows" button.
How good is this compared to the relatively new Tower Git client for Windows? SourceTree for Windows should be a little more mature but the recent versions felt like a step backwards.
When I tried the Tower beta for Windows it didn't have any support for tabbed repos or anything to make it easier to have multiple repos open at once (we use a lot of git submodules and need to easily bounce between them), so that was a dealbreaker for me.
Tower costs and Source Tree has a free version.
I briefly tried Tower for Windows a month or so as an alternative for SourceTree. The UI is nicer, but I found that it kept crashing on me.
It's been stable for me but I think it's probably too minimal, I will probably go back to SmartGit.
I still prefer Tower as my daily driver, but SoureTree has great interactive rebase support which Tower, unfortunately, does not
Used it long time ago, but later versions became extremelly slow and bloated, just like everything from Atlassian. Now I'm using Magit which is fantastic.
Edit: all the annoyances below are fixed on SourceTree 2.
I have double sized-icons that overlap the text, and SourceTree 2 couldn't uninstall SourceTree 1, but this seems like a welcome return to form so far. The UI seems a little faster too.
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Yep. I use SourceTree daily [1]. Current state of SourceTree 1.x on Windows:
- Highlighting files to see the diffs frequently breaks - you have the file highlighted but nothing shown in the diff view. You have to go to history and then back to see code changed in a file
- Dragging changes to staging area is broken
- Selecting upwards in a diff makes a non contiguous selection that can't be staged
[1] Alas none of the other git clients have a UI for interactive rebase, and I hate doing that on CLI.
I have double sized-icons that overlap the text, and SourceTree 2 couldn't uninstall SourceTree 1, but this seems like a welcome return to form so far. The UI seems a little faster too.
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Yep. I use SourceTree daily [1]. Current state of SourceTree 1.x on Windows:
- Highlighting files to see the diffs frequently breaks - you have the file highlighted but nothing shown in the diff view. You have to go to history and then back to see code changed in a file
- Dragging changes to staging area is broken
- Selecting upwards in a diff makes a non contiguous selection that can't be staged
[1] Alas none of the other git clients have a UI for interactive rebase, and I hate doing that on CLI.
the nicest, and comprehensively cross-platform client I have seen is Smartgit (http://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/). Its linux client works brilliantly!
Interestingly, it comes with integrations with bitbucket, github, etc to resolve pull requests and review comments.
Interestingly, it comes with integrations with bitbucket, github, etc to resolve pull requests and review comments.
GitKraken
Notes: non-free for commercial use and, most importantly, an Electron app.
I don't care about any of those currently, though.
I don't care about any of those currently, though.
What value does SourceTree provide when one can use 'git' in a terminal/command prompt?
What value does a car provide when you can use a bike? I'm using the CLI myself, but pretending that graphical software doesn't have any use is pretentious.
I'll have to give it a try, it can't be any worse than the previous versions, can it?
By the way, did you get the 2.0 update in the old 1.9 version? I didn't :/
Using SourceTree 1.9 or earlier? We implemented a change in the way we roll out updates (announced here) late last year, so if you’re using SourceTree for Windows 1.9 or earlier you will not see auto updates for 2.0. Please download 2.0 directly from our website instead.
Damn, I read this "earlier than 1.9". Sorry.
Source 1.9 has a fairly different autoupdate mechanism,
I reckon they'll push out a reinstall message or similar .
FWIW, the beta version did manage to update to final 2.0
FWIW, the beta version did manage to update to final 2.0
> FWIW, the beta version did manage to update to final 2.0
That's great. So hope the updates are now more stable.
That's great. So hope the updates are now more stable.
Then, trying to guess/figure out the correct previous version you were running that had all the functionality you needed is a nightmare.
I tried to give this a shot.
1. Run the installer.
2. Prompt informed me that I should uninstall the previous version of Sourcetree. No other information on the prompt. Close the prompt.
3. Nothing happens. I expect that the new version can't install next to an old version. No problem, let me go uninstall the old version...
4. After about 15 seconds of going through the control panel, uninstall programs, look for sourcetree, etc...
5. Sourcetree pops up. No notification that anything was installing. No customization of install options. No warning of any kind that this was actually being installed on your system.
6. Oh, look at that. They removed UI components that I consider critical, with no option of 'toggling' those components - just a complete removal (ex: the sidebar that listed all the projects. I have a lot of projects, scrolling through tabs at the top is not good enough)
I really wish the Windows side of Sourcetree would get it's shit together. I'll be going back to my older version.
Sorry for being such a negative nancy. If anyone has a recommendation for another Git GUI client for Windows, please let me know.