Comment by ArchReaper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ArchReaper | Hacker News Reader

The last several times I tried to update Sourcetree, it got significantly worse, with features and functionality being silently removed or broken left and right. Every UI 'improvement' they made felt backwards to me. Simple quality of life things like being able to drag files between the staged/unstaged area just stopped working.

Then, trying to guess/figure out the correct previous version you were running that had all the functionality you needed is a nightmare.

I tried to give this a shot.

1. Run the installer.

2. Prompt informed me that I should uninstall the previous version of Sourcetree. No other information on the prompt. Close the prompt.

3. Nothing happens. I expect that the new version can't install next to an old version. No problem, let me go uninstall the old version...

4. After about 15 seconds of going through the control panel, uninstall programs, look for sourcetree, etc...

5. Sourcetree pops up. No notification that anything was installing. No customization of install options. No warning of any kind that this was actually being installed on your system.

6. Oh, look at that. They removed UI components that I consider critical, with no option of 'toggling' those components - just a complete removal (ex: the sidebar that listed all the projects. I have a lot of projects, scrolling through tabs at the top is not good enough)

I really wish the Windows side of Sourcetree would get it's shit together. I'll be going back to my older version.

Sorry for being such a negative nancy. If anyone has a recommendation for another Git GUI client for Windows, please let me know.

I wish I could disagree with any of this, as SourceTree has the potential to be a really good Git client.

SourceTree's design is nice (although it could use some improvement), but there are so many niggling issues that just get in the way. Combine those with frequent application restarts due to unresponsive tools and windows and you have a recipe for finding a better tool.

I recommend Git Extensions.

> I have a lot of projects, scrolling through tabs at the top is not good enough

I think you are misunderstanding how the new flow is for repo viewing.

The tab (+) button is the replacement for the sidebar repo list. You are not expected to open every single repo and have them all as a separate tab. You are expected to open a reasonable amount of repos at once, do work with them, and then close them. If you want to look at other repos, you open them via the tab (+) button.

I don't think its that big of a deal to change it like that.

That's not to say this I think this is a perfect app. What I want them to improve is making it a bit nicer when you have more than ~10 repos open at once. The tabs are way too wide and scrolling through them is terrible with the way the scroll buttons work right now.

Does the (+) button open a file-open prompt, or is it a list of all previously opened projects?

If it's the former, then it's absolutely useless for my use-case, and a great example of removed functionality.

If it's the latter, then they have gone backwards in UX design (for my personal use case) - that is, it is now an additional layer of barrier for me to see and access all my projects, for what benefit? What problem is this solving?

If the only answer to the previous question is something to the effect of "cleaner UI" or "less clutter" then there is a fundamental problem with how they approach updates.

It really sucks that this is even a thing, because I feel bad for shitting on Atlassian so much, when I use Sourcetree almost exclusively, and have for quite a long time.

I agree that they mangled your use case, but think this is a pretty great improvement for probably >95% of their users.

Most users do have not that many repos and work on only very few a day. The former UI had two ways to switch repos, and to be honest it happened quite often to me that I had selected a repo on the left, but not the tab, and so was looking at the wrong stuff for a few seconds.

So I see your pain, but have to agree with the thinking behind this change.

(Although I think the new repo selection screen is not very pretty, misses functionality [I can see all my folder opened at the same time] and wastes so much space - it should have just been like the old repo list but in a different location)

The (+) button shows you the same list as the repo sidebar did before. That is what you want, and yes, it's 1 additional click now. Not so bad.

This looks promising: https://www.gitkraken.com/

Alas they've been promising rebase support for a couple of years now. Would love to try it when they do.

We have rebase support :)

Interactive rebase support.

I gave that a try. It looked neat, but nothing really amazing enough to shell out money when all I really need is tig and the shell.

The required centralised account kind of annoys me, but only because I'm not clear about what's going to happen with my email or account information.

Decent client but $60 / year was a bit too rich for me. May be the right price for other people though.

That said, I wish that SourceTree had a Linux client. People complain about it, but given that it's a better client than GitHub's and it's pretty polished; pretty good for free.

Honestly, they’ve been pulling the same crap on the Mac version, too. It’s like they purposely went about crippling their own app and making it worse in every way. Every version that comes out is uglier and has less functionality than before. And of course Atlassian could care less. They completely stopped responding on Twitter and started deleting all negative comments on their SourceTree blog. I have an older version for Mac OS X that I use, which I could never upgrade because all the newer versions are demonstrably worse. I hope it continues to work because there are no other native and non-hybrid/electron GUI clients let. (Tower has less than 50% of SourceTree’s features and the developers seem focused on creating a Windows version instead of adding the missing features to the already existing Mac version).

I think it's worth mentioning that Atlassian does care, which should show in this new version and the time and effort we have put in to make SourceTree faster and more reliable.

One of our goals over the past couple of years was to simplify SourceTree and make it easier for developers to get started with Git. Admittedly we did not always hit the right balance, but you can be sure we care and listen.

We didn't remove the negative comments from our blog, we removed all comments from our blog to minimise the number of channels on which people engage in discussions. Sorry if it created a perception that we don't care, it's quite the opposite.

Cheers, Jens

Looks like they opted to go for the "user local" installation approach on Windows, rather than installing per-system in \Program Files. I've seen other tools do this too.

That's correct -- we chose to do this because it allows users to install ST without admin privileges. We use Squirrel, which is an incredible library btw (https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows)

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