Try out the new Bitbucket Cloud pull request experience today!

[Alastair Wilkes]

Greetings Bitbucket Cloud community,

I am thrilled to share exciting news about how we're making code review easier in Bitbucket Cloud!

Code review is a critical part of the development workflow. To help reviewers assess changes quickly, we’ve historically taken a “code first” design approach for the pull request view, always displaying the diff first when the page loads.

Today, I'm excited to announce the new pull request experience, a redesign of the pull request view that displays everything the reviewer needs on a single page, without tabs. This new design helps reviewers approve changes faster compared to the old UI with features like:

• An expandable sidebar containing file tree, build statuses, and other info
• An omnipresent file tree for quick navigation between files without scrolling to the top
• "Sticky" header for quick actions without scrolling back to the top
• "Sticky" file headers so you always know which file you're reviewing
• File highlights in the file tree as you scroll down the page so you always know which file you're reviewing
• Collapsible diffs to mark your place as you review a diff
• and much more

Learn more about these features at the Bitbucket blog.

To try out the new pull request experience:

1. Click your avatar in the Bitbucket sidebar
2. Select Bitbucket Labs
3. Enable the New pull request experience feature

This opt-in release is a beta, and we are still working to bring some existing features over to the new view. We’ve made it easy to temporarily switch back to the old view using the “temporarily disable the new UI” link in the Feedback card at the bottom of the sidebar.

We'd love for you to try out the new experience and let us know what you think, either here in the comments or via the Feedback button in the new UI.

Happy reviewing!

Alastair
Bitbucket PM

[Marco Bradley]

That's great to hear!

The only thing keeping me from converting over is the lack of task support. Our workflow uses them to block merges if there are dependencies. Keep up the good work.

[Maxim Leonov]

Looking good so far!

Can there be a setting to enable 'Side-by-side' view for all diffs for all Pull Request by default?

There a long-standing request of similar nature:

https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/5689/side-by-side-diff-as-a-first-class-citizen

[Stefan Mezmer]

As i understand this is just for the Bitbucket Cloud. Any plans to bring it to Bitbucket Server too?

[sjerdo]

Hi Alastair,

I like the new interface, but it lacks most of the original pull request features. Thats why I won't be using the new interface.

I suggest not pushing the new UI as default while lots of features are still missing, like tasks, activity feed, support for renamed files, merge checklists and links to JIRA.

Are you planning on bringing these features back before pushing everyone to the new interface?

Regards,

Sjoerd

[Steve Francis]

I use the Activity tab every time I do a pull request review. Is this functionality somehow integrated into this new design? I read the article but didn't get this tidbit. :)

[Sylvain Pont]

Kinda big regression for me: renamed / moved files are not detected anymore.

[Deleted user]

@Alastair Wilkes Our team is still seeing this issue. When a file is renamed or moved, it is shown as if the old file was deleted and a new one created.

[Marco Bradley]

Hi Srirang,

Ours is pretty similar to yours I have slack integration but less verbose, on PR merges and requests pop up to let the team know to review. One difference is that we use tasks to halt a request from being merged before a dependency or issue is resolved.

I tried to just let comments hold it up but in some cases there is another repo for the DB that would need to be checked in first before the code or vice versa. To help with that I utilize the tasks and set a PR from merging without all of them being addressed from the repo settings. 

It has greatly reduced mistakes and missed fixes due to an update masking a comment on a previous commit.

[Deleted user]

@Alastair Wilkes have you actually gotten any good feedback from users preferring the "Atlassian Editor" over the simple, plain-text markdown editor for pull-request comments?

I'm genuinely curious as to why you're pushing it so hard. There's not a single developer at our company that has a nice thing to say about the new editor.

[Sébastien Gautrin]

Having a quick access to the diff between two versions of the pr, whether it is simply new commits pushed or the consequence of a rebase / force push would go a long way (ideally while still being within the pr context and thus being able to add comments to the diff in the context of the pr). 

[Sanjeewa Fonseka]

i want the ability to switch back to old view

[Lucas Amaral]

The new PR experience does not load mildly large files, this is TERRIBLE experience and a missing feature that my team will need before we are forced to migrate. I have written this in the feedback forms 100s of times, since the first time this beta testing started, but attlassian just ignored.

Can you please answer:

* When will you allow large files to be viewed in this new PR experience?

* How can I stay in the old PR page until this is fixed?

[joelcardinal]

Agree, kill it with fire.  There's nothing about the change that's an improvement and noted in this thread some major issues.  Fortunately, unlike poor Robert here, we are in a position to change vendors if BB pushes this through. 

I only have two issues with the current "original" PR experience:

• kills my Mac on large PR's making the fans spin up to compete with a 747
• I have to manually use a query (e.g. ?ts=4) to normalize file indentation -- yes we should be linting...but having a config on repos or a dynamic input on the PR page to set this would be fantastic

[Robert Parker]

Hey Atlassian, can you please stop showing me HUGE BANNERS TELLING ME ABOUT THE NEW PULL REQUEST EXPERIENCE IN BRIGHT COLORS AND LARGE FONTS until you actually put out a quality product???

What could have possibly compelled you to put out such a half-baked, dysfunctional piece of software as this, with fewer features than what already existed, various bugs, and did I mention the missing features? Who is the Product Manager responsible for making this decision? Why did you not just make improvements to what existed, and worked for the most part? Why do you insist on abusing your users this way?

I know you're a big leviathan of a company, but there are surely a decent number of competent people on your team that should have blown the whistle on this boondoggle.

Incomprehensible decisions like this are why I now resent being stuck on Bitbucket, and wish we had fully migrated to Github like we planned to at one point, but now we're stuck at your mercy, and this is what you come out with.

Please reconsider this new pull request experience. It's been years in the making and continues to be an inferior product, maybe it's time to pull the plug? Just remember that you should avoid making future decisions based on the sunk cost fallacy, you still have the choice to kill this new PR interface off, so make the right decision.

[jarredc]

We're actually planning on launching those improvements in the next 6 weeks!

We'll make it possible for you to select side-by-side as a default, to ignore whitespace for the session, to set your tab width, and to manage your diff add/subtract colors (in case you have red-green colorblindness). 

[Alastair Wilkes]

Hi Jon,

Sorry for the issue; we're working on fixing this.

Alastair

[Deleted user]

Hi @Alastair Wilkes,

Our team is currently evaluating BitBucket Cloud, and the biggest unhappiness blocking acceptance here is not only the lack of side-by-side diff as a default or first-class choice, or even for a full-page switch, but that when the choice is made it doesn't even survive a single page refresh, let alone a session.

I appreciate the work your team has put into this, and I'm happy to hear this has been in the backlog since September, but has this yet even been moved from backlog into WIP? Is there any sort of expectation when this will be corrected or introduced?

[Jiri Hana]

- The editor is incredibly buggy, but I hope that will improve.

- supporting markdown is not as good as it was in the old editor - e.g. if you paste abc` (without the ` at the beginning) and then correct it by adding it, nothing happens (this can easily happen when copying snippets from slack, for example)

But what really baffles me: in an editor for reviewing code, the toolbar contains emojis directly, but for code formatting, I have to go into embedded menus

[apartridge]

Second this. I find versioning of pull requests to be one of the biggest missing pieces in bitbucket. This is available in both gitlab (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/versions.html) and phrabricator.

[Mads K]

I fail to see syntax-highlightning mentioned anywhere?

[Jiri Hana]

Is it somehow possible to use this without the wysiwyg editor? I have the wysiwyg editor turned off, but that setting seems to be ignored when I enable the new pull request feature.

(I like the new PR, but if it forces me to use the wysiwyg editor instead of markdown, I don't want it).

[Tyler T]

Hi @Jon , sorry you are experiencing this issue. I'm unable to reproduce it using Chrome on a Mac. I no longer work on the Bitbucket team but have passed along your comment regarding the Give Feedback modal.

If you create a public issue the team can triage and track it on the public Jira: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD

[J]

@jarredc  Perhaps the old experience could be made available still for a short while, but leave everyone set to the new one by default. 

When switching off the new experience in Labs, require input stating what the reason is.  Once all feedback representing "this keeps me from working" items are fixed, then the rest who switched to the old because of things like familiarity/preference could be reasonably moved over and the plug pulled once more. 

[Deleted user]

Can we have the old PR view back?

I tried the new view for a month or so and it's cluttered and hard to navigate. Specially not friendly on laptop-size screen (standard 15"). If needed I can provide a list of why it's hard to use.

[Tyler T]

Hi @Eugene Gubenkov ,

See this post for more information about your question: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Bitbucket-questions/Self-approve-Pull-Request-no-longer-possible/qaq-p/1554714