New 2.0 tab interface unusable

[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.

[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.

[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.