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?

[Tomasz Kotula]

I've been putting up with V2.X for quite some time but in the end decided to save myself aggravation and installed V1.10. If lots of people did it than maybe Atlassian would start to listen.

[Michael Kansky]

Even with this f.. up change it is still the best GIT repo management tool out there, and Atlassian knows it, hence why there are no replies from the team...

Shame.

[Rick Zakharov]

Bryan,

Thank you!!! I really hope Atlassian is reading these.

From the progress of the SourceTree development however, or from the absence of any reply from their team, it doesn't seem that way.

[Bryan Farrell]

TL;DR:  Atlassian, you really messed up SourceTree with v2.0 when you removed the Bookmark TreeView UI and added the Tabs.  That change has greatly hurt people's productivity and ability to use the tool effectively.  I've added some relatively simple suggestions to resolve this and hope you will read them and consider them in a future release.

Atlassian, I've been a dedicated user of SourceTree for the past few years and I always considered this the best Git repo management tool out there.  I do have to strongly agree with the vast majority of the people in this discussion.

You really need to bring back the old style repo bookmark tree view section on the left side of the UI.  I used to use that extensively to map repo's to sub-folders on my machine and keep everything organized in bookmark sub-folders that matched the sub-folders that exist on the disk.

I also used that structure to create multiple clones of certain repos so I could have one for my personal development, a second for peer reviews and a third for the current production release.  With the old repo bookmark tree view section, I could have three root level folders (ie. Development, Peer Review & Production) and in those folders I could clone each repo I was involved with 3 times, one for each folder.

This allowed me to have a development branch for a project I was working as the active branch in the Development bookmark.  Then when I needed to peer review someone else's code, instead of having to stash/commit my changes, switch branches and then checkout the peer review branch, I could simply switch to the Peer Review folders clone of that repo, checkout the peer review branch and review the work.

Once I was done I could simply jump back into my Development clone and pick up where I left off without having to unstash changes etc.

Similarly if I had to debug a critical time sensitive production issue I would simply switch to the production bookmark, checkout the current production version and start debugging.

Now the new UI does allow me to create sub-folders when adding a repo so technically all of that functionality exists but the biggest problem is the tabs themselves.  The tabs do not identify what bookmark folder the repo is associated with just like they limit the display of the tab name so repo's that are all prefixed with a certain name all look the same when viewing the tab.  I actually have that situation also so in addition to not knowing what bookmark folder the tab is associated with I cannot see the full repo name.

The most ideal situation would be to add back in the bookmark treeview section and you could even keep the tabs.  Just make the tree view have a selected record that matches the tab.  So double clicking on an entry in the tree view opens up a new tab to that bookmark's repo and also highlights the bookmark so you know that is the one the tab is associated with.  This would solve both not knowing what bookmark folder a tab is associated with and also what the full name of the repo is, as you could always display the full name in the treeview and only a fixed limit of characters in the tabs.

If there is no way your going to bring back that tree view then I have another suggestion.  Do three things to the tabs bar.  First, double the height of the tab and add a second line of data below the tab name and in that line put the bookmark folder name.  Second, make the tab size variable so that it stretches with the length of the name (within reason) and add a tool tip that would show the full name if it overflows the max tab width you decide to use.  Third, when the tab bar is completely full, instead of having left and right arrows to scroll thru the tabs, have the last entry on the right be a drop down and when you click on it the drop down would contain all the tabs not visible in the bar.  A good example of how this works is the way SQL Server Management Studio handles tabs.

Finally, add back the ability to add Sub-Folders to the Bookmark Folders so that we can organize our bookmarks in a true tree view layout.

Any of these suggestions would be a vast improvement over what you released with 2.0.  Clearly most people don't like the changes so I hope your doing something to make this better for those of us who really miss the older tree view bookmark structure.  I hope you really consider fixing this.

[Mike McGraw]

Atlassian, is there any update in restoring the repo list? This is very disappointing. This is a known issue for 8 months now with no solution? You really need to bring back the repo list.

[michael_letcher]

I'm using the VS Code GIT which is nice, though it cannot handle submodules so Sourcetree is still in use with me :(

[michael_letcher]

Sadly not an option for me on MAC.

Thankfully I can keep the browser on the left and its just acts like the old side panel.

[Erik Blake]

You can avoid the security vulnerability by:

• Remove the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\sourcetree so that the problematic URI vulnerability goes away (of course, you lose the option to use sourcetree:// links, but for me that's not an issue).
• Use external git/mercurial (not the ones that ship with the old versions of sourcetree) and keep them updated.

[Erik Blake]

You can avoid the security issue by:

• Use external git/mercurial and keep that updated
• Remove the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\sourcetree so that the problematic URI vulnerability goes away (of course, you lose the option to use sourcetree:// links, but for me that's not an issue).

[Tudor]

Performance is 0 excuse for UI design. If you understand data oriented programming you can implement a world like GTA V without lagging. Why exactly is your interface lagging in either one of your UX Design choices?

[Martin Widmer]

I stopped using SourceTree entirely. Using Visual Studio 2017 along with GitFlow PlugIn for Visual Studio 2017 is much better. A clear crisp easy to use UI. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vs-publisher-57624.GitFlowforVisualStudio2017

[Taimur Alavi]

I downgraded to 1.10.23.1, got my left-bar back and fixed a whole bunch of other issues too, I'd recommend :)

[David Martinez]

I gotta vent here and agree with everyone. I hate it when software applications kill the cardinal rules of: KISS and If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Now my project is much more difficult to navigate, and even when I think I'm making a change it seems like there's some error or something.

I may just go back to the old ways of plain old command line + the Eclipse add-on tool.

[Michael Kansky]

+1. Work with 40+ projects at a time. Tabbed interface is tremendously affecting my productivity.

Imagine me looking at a sky asking to bring the old TreeView interface back. Can anyone hear me from Atlasssian team? "Bring it back! Pretty please"

[curtisawhite77]

I agree completely. I use a Mac at work and a PC at home. It's very annoying to have to learn a completely new interface for Sourcetree on Windows. When you spend a lot of time working with a tool you become very productive with it. Then to have the UI completely change on a different OS just makes it painful to use when you go back and forth. I find myself wanting to find a different tool that works the same on both OS's.

[Paul Johanson]

I can only agree with all the above. I currently have about 20 tabs (my company has lots of little projects), and having them across the top is unuseable.

[lbroerman]

Adding another voice to the sea of feedback.  The new UI is unusable, we need a view of the state of all repositories while viewing the details of a single repository.

I won't be updating past 1.9 until this usability issue is fixed.

[NDE-Agentur]

Sorry this only sounds like a poor mans excuse. You didn't even think about users pain, did you? Even with only a few Repos open, the client sucks performance like ever before. So at least give us back some usability.

[NDE-Agentur]

This Tabs and Window Tile thing is really uggly and makes the application nearly unusable. I had to downgrade all my machines. Sadly Atlassian only has poor excuses on that topic and no real solution yet. Please do something, i think ALL customers really HATE it!

[Sergey Ermakov]

Found this page while searching for a way to downgrade to version 1.9. And I agree with everything said here.

Just wanted to say that I'm absolutely frustrated with SourceTree 2.0. There are problems with tabs, maximize/minimize button (i.e. window resizing). Remote details (host/username) in Repository settings are periodically lost, so I can't even make a pull request. List of branches closes when I'm scrolling through it to find a specific one. Checkouting a branch from Stash/BitBucket sometimes cleares my repositories list, so I have to find them over and over again.

Now I'm done with it. Gonna get back 1.9 and forget about everyhting written here

[Software Licenses Virtamed]

The same that we did!

[Software Licenses Virtamed]

Thank you for acknowladging. I am not sure why showing the updates for repositories is a Performance constraint.

Unfortunately the 2.X version got slower every time I got an update. Currently, it distracts me from work, as the auto-refresh -that actually refreshes the things I am not interested in - is so slow, that it locks up the entire tab content rendering Sourcetree unusable.

We now reverted to 1.10 version of sourcetree and maybe I try 2.X again in the future.

That said. I really like the effort, but I am not sure you are targeting all audiences with the changes you made.

[Calin Bunea]

This is the most freaking frustrating issue I'm also facing... what the hell?

[Calin Bunea]

I also have to express my disapointment for the new UI. Besides the left column issue I'm facing a more freaking frustrating issue. For some stupid reason my source tree is refreshing over and over my remote repositories. When I expand the remote origin it starts to perform several refreshes. Basically I can't browse the remote branches. Do you guys have QA people there or are you doing like facebook does when they release new features directly to users without testing them? 

[Software Licenses Virtamed]

Well, I do have quite a few projects open at the same time. also I do not want to constantly close projects and re-open them, even when not working on them at the same time.

And the tool should scale to how we work, not us adapting how it wants us to work