nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

New 2.0 tab interface unusable

Michael Marshall

The second I opened 2.0 and saw the new tabbed interface, I utterly hated it.

In the previous interface I had a nice list on the left of all open/active projects and could see the status of each in one glance: Project A has changes to commit, Project B has server updates to import, etc. Worked perfectly; there was never a question about each project's status.

The new interface shows me absolutely nothing about the status of any of the visible projects. Even if they did, more than a few tabs and they'll scroll out of view...

The only way to see overall status is to click the + button, but that's not what it's for...

And there doesn't seem to be any option to restore the previous view.

So back to 1.10 for us. Seriously, how did such a clearly defective design change get approved?

Accepted answers

All comments

adriangreen

Agreed this new UI is un-usable. I have bookmarked hundreds of repos into a folder structure that allows me to quickly locate what I need.

Now, for each and every repo I need to visit, I have to click "+", then click on a folder (or search "All Repos"), open the repo (If I actually managed to find it). Then click "+", then click on a folder (or search "All Repos"), open the repo (If I actually managed to find it). Then click "+", then click on a folder (or search "All Repos"), open the repo (If I actually managed to find it)....

At least in the old system - everything could be made visible. The status of each repo was clear. I could open 10 repos in a matter of seconds!

I LOVE that the bookmarks are now filterable - a totally awesome feature that should have been there all along. However this new bookmark system is just torturous. Cruel and unusual punishment. I've got work to do, not click around all day looking for things.

Please reconsider this 'improvement'. (but KEEP the filtering!).

Blair Davies_6q9pe0

Agreed with the use case and agree with Adrian Green.

Pros: New repo listing is actually usable. Drag and drop import of local repos to sourcetree is huge (random drag and drop of the old bookmark list would cause entire folders to vanish from the app). Searching/filtering is great

Cons: No "dashboard" to see statuses of local repositories. Those of us with literally hundreds of repos (enterprise microservices...) are not well suited to the + button. Tabs do not show enough information - which repo am I on? What is it's name, address, folder path, breadcrumb, etc?

Big con for me: Custom actions are harder to use. I use custom actions to merge releases to master and develop (gitflow) in one click, launch visual studio solutions in one click, etc. Custom actions aren't available except by right click, and not by right clicking the branch. Right clicking the history view is unintuitive.

Toastie

I can only agree with this. The missing project overview panel is a great step back in usability.

Me and my co-workers are working with 15+ projects. The project names are all beginning with the same prefix. When I need to find a special one, there is no way to distinguish them in the tab bar as the names are not fully displayed with so many projects open. So finding the right project often means to check multiple tabs to find the right project.

How could anyone think, the project panel is not needed anymore???? And if someone thinks so, why isn't there a way to turn it on or off???

Just a REALLY BAD design idea. Try to switch back to a previous version now. Currently using version 2.0.19.1.

Ken Domino

I agree. This GUI is terrible. I cannot tell which tab is actually the one I select as there is only a 1 pixel boundary change to "highlight" the selected tab. (See red-circled items in the image below.) Further, in the old GUI, I could right click a tab, and get a context menu that would have an option to delete the repository. After fishing through every menu item, all the icons under the tabs, it looks like I can't even delete a repo within Sourcetree now. Just terrible UI design.

Alex Steffes

Please bring back Show/Hide Bookmarks (Ctrl+B)

In another discussion, Please re-implement the repository treeview, Ana from Atlassian said :

removing the repository treeview was a decision
made by the SourceTree team based on our user feedback

My question is who are these users giving feedback? Did Atlassian survey these users at all? How many repos did they have bookmarked on average? Are these people employeed at a small or large company?

This feature is why I use SourceTree and is what I believe makes it powerful and unique.

Trang Dinh Van

Bring back the left folder structured pane as previous please!

unknown

Bring back the left folder structured pane - maybe as an Option to choose between new and old Interface

David Campbell_mv9c4u

Totally agree with this; please bring back the left pane displaying all of my bookmarked repositories displaying their 'git status'.

Which users did you get feedback from? Did they only have one git repo?

The tree structure allows you to be more productive. I may have a single project with 8 or more repositories. I can see immediately see which changes I need to pull to ensure I have the most current changes.

The folders allow all sorts of categorisation: you can group by repos by drives (C, D) or by location (eg. github) or anything else you could imagine.

If GitKraken brings in a treeview, I think many 1.9.10.0 sourcetree users will start using it, even if they have to shell out some cash. It has a compelling and beautiful design.

Atlassian should take a good look at GitKraken and hire a professional UI designer.

Geoff Sokoll

Agree - bring back the bookmark treeview. We have many repos (> 75) and this release is unusable without the bookmark pane.

unknown

Agree - bring back the bookmark treeview. We have many repos (> 75) and this release is unusable without the bookmark pane.

In my case, I have different "projects" (about 65) a few with the same name. The only way to know on which I'm working is the path ... and it's not displayed.

Vladislav Kiselev

Hello guys, here are two issues about this problem:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREEWIN-7176

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREEWIN-7163

Please vote on them. Probably it helps.

Geert van Horrik

A combination of using the old bookmarks treeview and using CTRL + T (with the *focus on the filter automatically*) would be fantastic.

Most of the time I know which repo I want to open. Being able to use CTRL + T with a simple filter (e.g. OC for Orc.Controls) would be really awesome.

But sometimes I need to manually go through all the repositories in a group (folder) which is really awkward with the new UI.

Simon Adams

Agree totally with almost everyone commenting!!! We use ~15 repositories regularly, and name them with common prefixes (namespaces) so of course many tabs show the exact same label! Also cannot tell status of my current repositories! This kinds of tells me the Sourcetree development team does not use Sourcetree

What were they thinking? Do they not test with more than 3 or 4 repositories? Do they not feel being able to tell the status of repositores at a glance is important?

To make matters worse, I just received an email from Atlassian recommending everyone to upgrade to Sourcetree 2 (for Windows) because of a security problem with all older versions ("We are writing to inform you of a security vulnerability that exists in SourceTree for Mac starting with 1.4.0 but before 2.5.1 and SourceTree for Windows starting with 0.8.4b but before 2.0.20.1.").

I don't know if I should re-install 1.9 (a version I can work with) or stick with the faster (but labotomized) version 2.0. (sigh)

kcrumley

I just installed this an hour ago, and haven't used the new version enough to co-sign what the OP says about the overall changes, but let me say (scream) "+1" to what Ken Domino says about the styling on the tabs. I switch between tabs multiple times a day, and the different between "light gray" and "5% lighter gray" doesn't visually read as any tab being highlighted at all. I upgraded to 2.0.20.1 from 1.9.x, so I don't know when the tabs started looking this way. I've seen multiple 2.0.x screenshots where there was apparently no border at the bottom of the selected tab (which makes a huge difference), so it's possible that things only got screwy quite recently. But this is a huge step backward from the tabs in 1.9.x.

At first, I thought maybe it was my Windows display settings, but changing themes and turning on high contrast mode did nothing for me. I haven't tried this on a non-4K monitor yet, so I guess it's possible that this issue only pops up in higher DPI mode? But I really don't know how anyone at Atlassian could be using this on Windows and think it's useable.

Why have a border at the bottom of the tab at all? 2017-05-10 (3).png

kcrumley

I take it back, just used a color picker and both the selected and non-selected tabs are #f5f5f5.

ThermoX

I just started using 2.0.20.1. I gotta say, the biggest issue I have so far (after playing with it for about 30 minutes) is the lact of path info on the repos.

I often have 2 instances of the same repo, residing on 2 different machines. One instance is on the development machine, and the other instance on the test machine. Previously, a quick glance at the path confirmed which one I was currently viewing. Now, there's absolutely nothing differenciating them in SourceTree, by default. I have to rename them with specific names as soon as I add them to the bookmarks.

Of course, I could use the new Folder feature to group them by target machines, but that would only be useful when looking at the bookmarks under the + tab. Once the 2 repo tabs are up, they are identical if I don't rename them. And I can see no way of knowing which one is which, at that point.

kcrumley

I went back into Display settings and tried changing the DPI setting. Changed the "Change the size of text, apps, and other items" slider from 150% (the recommended setting for my 3840x2160 native resolution monitor) to 125% and 175%, and both options made the border at the bottom of the tab go away. So, at least on my machine, this is an issue of high-DPI scaling, at the specific setting of "150%". This also explains why everybody else's screenshots looked OK, and why not everybody is complaining about this.

But... 150% is the right setting -- the correct balance of readable-sized text and fitting a lot of stuff on the screen. I'm not going to rescale everything on my computer to make the latest version of SourceTree have useable tabs. Please do something about this.

A T_u4v3lo

Utterly horrid UI now.

The windows 8 bricks feel hit me in the face however the loss of the repo / project tree is a kick to the pants.

So we can't go back because of security vuln. cant use this as is...

mathias herbaux

Unusable, how to manage our repositories, before removing it, it would have been smarter to have an option to display it or not. And because you collect data about user usage, you could made the right decision later ????

Jonas Ströbele

Entirely unusable for anyone with large project counts.

We'll be issuing a recommendation both inside our company as well as our external partners not to update SourceTree to 2.0.

Sam Mackrill_9lcg3k

Not unuable, but pretty painful to use with multiple repros now.

DragonFyre

I totally agree myself. +2 thumbs.

I want my bookmark list on the left where I had. The #1 advantage of this is being able to see that status of all my local repos in one glance at any time no matter what repo I have currently selected/open. I can see that, "oh, someone added a fix in github available for me to pull in xTools repo!" Rather than having to open up ANOTHER tab just to see the list.

In fact, I NEVER liked the tab view. I'd rather have only the bookmarks on the left side and simply double-click on one to open it up on the right hand view window... I only need (or can) look at one at a time anyway. Why, then, have all the tabs in the first place? Is it to make it conform to current browser standards today, Firefox, Chrome, IE, Edge, etc? If that's the case, then it still doesn't make sense to have this layout for sourcetree. It's not a browser and just because standards are what people are used to should not necessarily mean they apply to every application - just my 3 cents.

Please, Atlassian, bring back the Bookmark left-hand menu and do away with the tabbed interface!!

Janet Cross

I agree with pretty much everything said here. I really need the bookmark list back. I too manage multiple repos for multiple projects at a time, and being able to easily see where I need to sort out commits or pull down changes is really imprtant to me. The tabs don't support this easily at all. For me, this version is unusable. And if Atlassian are saying it was a choice based on user feedback, what users?! Why not just make it an option to show or hide it based on preference rather than removing it altogether?

rice103

Very bad UI. I choosen SourceTree for simple and direct interface but now isn't it!. Please give us the old interface!

Przemyslaw Lusina

Hi,

First I really like this software ( missing it on linux platform )

And then:

1) 2.0 is slower

2) Please add search box for branch checkout !!!!

3) Pushing selected branch to origin box show all branches also those which are not local, why ???? it's impossible to scroll this in bigger projects.

4) remotes in side menu are blinking ( by expanding for a while during pull ) this make this interface even slower

I are doing grate job! but please focus on usibility not apperance ... like you do for last two releases

Regards

Przemek L.

chhabs

Thanks for writing in and expressing your concerns with the sidebar. We've received an overwhelming amount of feedback regarding interface bloat and performance. Removing the repository browser and giving it its own tab allowed us to offer a simplified workspace and better use the window real estate. Additionally, we were able to improve performance across the board by offloading any background tasks to be called on demand.

Additionally, we were able to improve performance across the board by offloading any background tasks to be called on demand.

That said, we understand that the repository browser was used in many different ways. We will continue to explore solutions to address the dashboard-like functionality that doesn't compromise the experience or hurt performance.

Thank you for your understanding.

Rahul

Product Manager | SourceTree

Jeremy Louden

Cannot use

Gianluca Greco

I've found this page searching the net for a way to restore the bookmarks sidebar after the upgrade to version 2.0.

I just want to add my voice to the request to get it back.

I have a real lot of repos and cannot work this way, so I switched back to version 1.9.13.7 (I think it is the last 1.9 released).

Thank you for your work and bye.

Hyrtwol

Agree with all here... Have been using sourcetree faithfully for years now, so tx for providing it! But...
Starting 2.0 i was happy to see the resizing issues have been fixed tx! at last have been bugging me since the start.
Then i spend 20 min looking for my bookmarks, hitting CTRL + T like there's no tomorrow... Googled a bit... pressed CTRL + T a few more time... Then i found the new '+', great you can search, was unable to dock it side-by-side or anything.
In my old book marks i had sub folders etc (woking as a devops i have 200+ repos locally and need to swap often) the sub folders are gone afaik.
Last i simply dont understand the layout, why is the font size/line height all of a sudden so big? smells like they got a ui component for a touch screen?! also what is up with all the white space, specially to the right?? did somebody forget to anchor the listbox to the edge?
So now i have to go make a internal confluence page explaning everybody how to work with sourcetree 2.0, also bundling 2.0 with a security warning was a bit unfair when the ui is changed so mutch.
Would have prefered a securety-fix for the old version, then slowly migrate to 2.0
But what can you do, you cant complain about free stuff?
I just start to get the feeling we're all QA'ing sourcetree, and i dread that in the near future we'll see a "SourceTree Pro", "SourceTree Enterprise" or "SourceTree 2017", where you get the "nice" features.
Oh also the "Clone in sourcetree" links stopped working after reinstall to 2.0
Pleeease bring the bookmarks pane back

Gary Creech

The old was much better. Thanks.

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