SourceTree: What do colors of Branches and Tags mean?

[Johannes Kilian]

Do the color of branches and tags within log-view do have any special meaning?

[Kieran Senior [Atlassian] · Accepted solution]

Hi Johannes,

They have no meaning at all, they're only there so you can easily distinguish between different branches and tags.

The colours change when you change branch because a branch doesn't hold any state by which we determine a colour, we just calculate unique colours when the view initially loads.

Hope that helps

[Johannes Kilian]

That's something I assumed. In my eyes I might be useful to use some more colors than four only - looking on the example above it might be assumed at a first look, that the yellow ones are related to each other (green also). The red ones ARE actually related as they all refer to the same branch ....

[Vladimir Bjelakovic]

At least i would expect that develop branch is in whole tree shown with same color. Sometimes it is not. It is really confusing when one branch is in one specific timeline span blue then few commits after pink (and some other branch take blue color)..

[Johannes Kilian]

This is mainly an issue of git and how it handles branches. Have a look at my (answer here)[https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/310287/how-to-know-which-branch-color-correlates-with-which-branch]. *develop* is not a special branch for git in any way - it's a normal branch like each other branch. So why should it be treated specially by git when rendering trees,created via git-log?. Branch *develop* gets it's special meaning by the branching model you use (for example gitflow ...). What you are asking for is a graph rendering depending on the applied branching model. As the branching model could not be enforced in any way (it's only a recomendation) via the used tools (git/sourcetree) it does not make sense (in my eyes) to render the graph using assumptions from a branching model which is not sure/enforced to be used ...

[Lewis Garrett]

It would be a nice option to allow the user to select "git flow" colors be used to color branches according to the "git flow" model, i.e. Master=blue, hotfix=orange, release=green, develop=yellow, feature=pink.

[Nicholas Nicholas]

I agree with Lewis.

[Alex Batyrshin]

+1
or give ability to select colors 

[Victor van der Wolf]

Yes, please allow for selecting colors.

If this is too much trouble, at least show a legend explaining what color belongs what branch.

[Southerlies]

+1

Agree with Lewis

[Roeland Hidding]

+1

[Rodrigo da Silva]

+1

[Waldemar Holzwarth]

+1

[Joris van Leeuwen]

+1

[Brandon Snider]

Also a +1 to Lewis, although I'd prefer to just be able to specify colors for my branches independently.

For example, allow us to tell source tree:

"Any branch called 'MyRandomBranchName' should be rendered as blue"

and

"Any branch called 'feature' should be rendered as a green line"

I would imagine that this could be done by changing only the GUI logic of the program. It would be a very nifty feature.

[Ted Czotter]

+1 please make branch colors in some way consistent. I'll take git flow or manual.

Our team has grown and now my tree is so full of changing colors (and position as well!) that I now have lower comprehension of the situation. 

[mystride admin]

The color graph is useless right now.  Being able to map specific colors to specific branch names would be a godsend!  

Considering this has been an obvious pain point since 2013, I won't hold my breath.