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Comment by chinhodado | Hacker News Reader

It is sad that Sourcetree, once the go-to git GUI for Windows and Mac is now full of bugs and performance issues, and almost always gets worse with every new version. They updated the UI every major version (e.g. 1.5 to 1.6, or 1.7/1.8/1.9), in most cases for no good reason (in fact they faced so much backlash on the change to flat grey UI that they had to backpedal and reintroduced colored icons). And yet they are still planning on a major UI change again in the next version. At the same time, basic functionalities are broken left and right.

But on the other hand it is a big opportunity for others like Tower

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Hey Everyone, I hear ya - we’re cranking away on SourceTree and have a few things in our hopper coming in a few short weeks that’ll address many of your concerns.

Check out our most recent beta version, SourceTree for Windows 1.9.7 Beta 2 [1] with an updated TreeView to support folder level diffs, support for LFS 1.4.1, improved performance when switching tabs, a huge fix for addressing invalid dictionaries in the Spell Checker registry and many more fixes listed here [2].

We’re also working hard on improving the whole experience. Download Alpha 2.0.0 [3] for a sneak peek at a brand new SourceTree for Windows. Alpha 2.0.0. comes with high DPI support, improved repository browser & bookmarks view, patched memory leak and new tabbed navigation. Just a heads up, there are some known issues with Alpha 2.0.0, but they’ll be addressed in Alpha 2.0.1 in the coming weeks. Feel free to watch the repo to get notified of new builds.

Full disclosure - I’m the Product Manager on SourceTree. LMK if you’d like to chat; there’s a link to my calendar on my HN profile page.

[1]: https://bitbucket.org/atlassianlabs/sourcetree-betas/downloa...

[2]: https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/update/windows/beta/ReleaseNot...

[3]: https://bitbucket.org/atlassianlabs/sourcetree-betas/downloa...

It's good to hear that tree view is coming back. The ui changes around 1.7/1.8 were somewhat annoying, but the removal of tree view "because it was slow" was horribly handled. State "we know it's slow, but it's not widely used and it'll be addressed in x months".. Don't just remove it with no alternative.

Out of frustration, I switched to gitkraken around that time. The main feature it has over sourcetree is auto-stash, which is exactly the type of feature I wish atlassian was working on, rather than more ui revamping.

Either way, I wish you good luck with it, and thanks for bringing a great git ui to Windows.

TortoiseGit is by far the best Git GUI on Windows or anywhere else. The UI is light, fast and it stays out of your way. It's very tightly integrated with the file browser, which is really the only app I want to be using to look at my files...

SourceTree OTOH is slow and clunky on every platform. But even if it had a light and fast UI - it's not integrated with my file browser, which sucks. With TortoiseGit, every Git command that I need is a single click away when I'm viewing my files.

if tortoisegit is the best there is (that's what I use since forever when I'm not actually in msysgit's shell, and usually I am - never tried anything else), then there's quite a lot of room for a better GUI client.

I mean, tortoise gets the job done, but it isn't what I'd consider fast or convenient.

It's not the best - there is Tower now.

>TortoiseGit is by far the best Git GUI on Windows or anywhere else

I disagree. GitExtensions is by far the best Windows UI for Git.

+1 for TortoiseGit . It works very well.

It's nice for being integrated with explorer, but far from the best ui. In fact I'd hold up TortoiseGit as an example of why knowing a a ui toolkit does not make a programmer a ui expert: it's a pretty terrible ui. Don't get me wrong: If you know git well and are familiar with how to use TortoiseGit then it's functional. It's just not a good first exposure to git, nor is it easy to learn.

Yeah dragging commits to Staging on SourceTree Windows doesn't work anymore. It's fine on Mac.

Does Tower do interactive rebase? That's one of the main reasons I use SourceTree. Is the interactive rebase functionality good?

Update: Tower doesn't have interactive rebase. https://twitter.com/joeycadle/status/777862389286989824

Sticking with SourceTree since it does.

I use a combination of SourceTree and TortoiseHg with the HgGit extension...what's sad is that TortoiseHg tends to work better than SourceTree, and definitely ebtter than the official GitHub client.

TortoiseHg with HgGit? Why don't you just use TortoiseGit?

TortoiseHg is completely different than TortoiseGit, despite the similar names (and logos). While the latter is an assortment of context menus and dialogs, THG has this plus a great "workbench" which combines everything into one. It's easily possible to use THG alone without ever touching the command line which is a rather nice feature when trying to convince non-programmers to use version control. If there was a git equivalent, I'd happily use it.

I've run Sourcetree for the past three years, and I'm running the Sourcetree beta for Mac right now.

Just as a data-point: I'm quite satisfied with the UI changes. The UI is pleasing and functional.

For the work that I use Sourcetree for, it is not broken left and right. It is not broken at all. For staging files, browsing branches, browsing stashes, switching branches, doing the occational cherry-pick it works fine. It works really great for doing fine-grained (line or chunck) staging.

Since 1.9.x SourceTree has had a major memory leak that results in noticeable lag when I'm typing in the UI (e.g. a commit message) if the RAM usage is 1GB+.

Has anyone used tower and sourcetree and can compare them both? I am just about fed up with sourcetree and ready to switch to a not-terrible alternative.

On Windows Git Extensions is the best I've found: https://gitextensions.github.io/

SourceTree is barely usable now really, I switched back to GitX on OSX...

Git Extensions has certain shortcomings (search doesn't work that great, deleting branches is clunky etc.), but its competitors - on Windows at least - are even worse, I agree.

Besides, Git Extensions is written in C# and open-source... once I finally have some time on my hands (read: never), I'd gladly add some simple features that I'm missing in it

I really like Git Extensions commit screen, the best from the git GUIs I've used. It has great shortcuts to stage/unstage/reset and you can even separate lines to be commited.

I use Tower on Mac daily. I initially recommended SourceTree for the Windows users in my team (they were all new to Git) but after using it with one of them I rescinded that recommendation. It is awful.

If Tower for Windows is anything like its Mac counterpart I would recommend it head-and-shoulders over anything else. Well worth the price!

It is. I have been using the closed beta for a while now and besides an installer bug, it's almost as good as the OS X version.

Edit: typo fix

I've only used Sourcetree briefly, a couple years back when I was deciding between GUI frontends to Git. I compared Tower, Sourcetree, Github Desktop, and maybe one or two others.

Tower was the clear winner then and Tower 2 has only improved on it.

I was, and in many ways still am, a Git novice. Like many, I only did the basic commands in order to work with my team. But Tower has helped me become a (somewhat) better branch strategist, in some cases even enabling me to recommend to my more senior colleagues ways to fix problems with branches.

The reason I have been able to more meaningfully contribute is because Tower, like many GUIs, makes things discoverable. So while the command-line equivalents are hidden from view, the sequence and logic of working with different branches is exposed by the spatial metaphors that inhere in the GUI.

As a final plug, the Tree view that Tower provides continues to help me gain insight about how my work and the work of my colleagues integrates into our product's main branch.

I'm not associated with Tower except as a very satisfied user. It's not perfect, and there are some things I wish it did better. But the product is under active development and the product is rock solid.

I use both SourceTree and Tower on OS X and Windows.

While I can say that on OS X, both work better than their counterpart on Windows, Tower is still my go to client. I think the biggest thing is that when I started with Tower, things just clicked. On top of that, with Tower, I has never dealt with bugs or any issues (besides the windows beta installer).

SourceTree on Windows is pretty much worthless. It won't handle large repos well and large changes cause it to lock up and crash when trying to stage files. If you don't like Tower, I would recommend ungit[1] for Windows.

[1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/ungit

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