SourceTree is a free Mac client for Git, Mercurial and Subversion | Hacker News Reader

SourceTree is a free Mac client for Git, Mercurial and Subversion

sourcetreeapp.com

96 pointsDanielRibeiro21 comments

We have some team members who aren't so command line savvy(don't ask why). I recommend source tree to them and they are quite happy with it (which means others can work without interrupts). It's a decent app for basic/everyday things.

* Shameless plug * We are working on app that aims to make collaboration with Git extremely simple. It's targeted towards people like your coworkers. Essentially, the idea is to forget about the complexities of version control and to just focus on your work. You can learn a bit more here: http://gitpilot.com

I've been using Sourcetree for around a year now. It's good, but I've had the following issues:

- UI was very slow due to constantly polling the server - now fixed

- Chokes on very large binary diffs (about a month ago - a whole bunch of static files were added to a repo, switching between branches becomes a pain). Tower was able to handle this fine.

- It uses an embedded git binary, rather than a library. I don't trust apps that scrape command line tools, I expect at some point the tool will produce output that has not been anticipated.

The use of the embedded Git binary is optional though; you can configure SourceTree to use the system installation of Git.

I'd prefer it not to scrape stdout from a a git binary at all, but rather a use a real library with well defined interfaces.

Although not free, I've been using Tower a lot lately for Git, even though I had used the command line interface for the past few years. I just find it a lot easier to divide chunks of work up into smaller commits using it rather than on the command line.

http://www.git-tower.com/

If you're a vim user, then vim-fugitive is also worth looking at!

https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive

Mac Mercurial users should also check out (ha ha) MacHG. For me, it feels a lot better than SourceTree and just hit 1.0 beta.

http://jasonfharris.com/machg/

For emacs, there is magit.

Please note: if you use SourceTree as a Subversion client and you store your local repo in git format, empty directories will not be tracked or versioned.

I wish there was an application like this for Windows!

With Phil Haack recently moving from Microsoft to Github, you can expect a polished Git client for Windows sometime soon.

If you're working with Visual Studio on Windows, for now you can use Git Extensions (http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/) + Git Source Control Provider (http://gitscc.codeplex.com/)

Came here to say the same thing. I love TortoiseHG but it does lack polish, and TortoiseGIT is clunky as hell.

Could you elaborate? In which way you feel that TortoiseHg lacks polish? I'm not saying it doesn't, but we are really trying to make it the best cross platform mercurial client out there and are always looking for ways to improve it. Suggestions and constructive criticism are always welcome!

I had the same issue this blogger describes regarding "No URL Selected". The solution is given in the comments. I did not review the whole post, but I think the post addresses some other issues as well that you might be interested in reviewing.

http://coderscentral.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-have-fanati...

I also believe that installation on Linux could be more polished, but that is based on my experience from over six months ago, so I'm not sure if the process has been improved.

These are the first two things that come to mind since you asked. Overall, I find the program polished, and when I use it on Windows I find the shell integration convenient.

The blogger makes a few good points. I think part of the problem is that he seemed to expect TortoiseHg to hold his hand a little bit more while he was learning to use mercurial. Instead TortoiseHg expects you to have a basic understanding of the main mercurial concepts (i.e. clone vs push, etc). If you do I think the experience is much smoother, since we have been careful to follow mercurial's naming convenctions and workflow when possible.

In addition TortoiseHg has a pretty good (IMHO) online help that goes through some of these concepts and perhaps going through it would have helped him... Regardless I agree that the initial "new user" experience could be better and that expecting a user to RTFM is probably naive these days...

Out of the issues that are raised in that blog post I think the "No URL" one is the most serious. TortoiseHg should make it easy for you to understand and fix the problem. I am looking into it and hopefully it will be better handled on the next version of TortoiseHg (2.4).

What I plan to do, other than improving the error message itself, is to show the "Sync widget" whenever a user tries to push without having configured a remote repository first.

Please let me know of any other problems or improvements that you'd like to see, and I'll see if we can do something about them.

The other thing that comes to mind, which is minor, is that TortoiseGit and TortoiseSVN both have a place in the GUI settings where an SSH client can be specified (e.g., the path to Putty's plink.exe). I noticed that TortoiseHg does not have a similar setting in its global settings GUI, and must be configured manually in the config file.

I really miss all those apps like Coda, Tower, SparrowMail or SourceTree on my Windows machine too :(

After many years working with TFS' GUI, and TortoiseSVN when I switched to Mercurial and Git I just stayed with the command line. I've been much happier since.

Immediately having problems saving Remote Repository Settings. Just won't save a new Remote Repo.

Buggy as...

Atlassian: Please spend less time reinventing the wheel and more time on integrating git and mercurial into Jira Studio/Atlassian OnDemand. The existing integration is quite lacking, and the community has been incredibly vocal about it: https://studio.atlassian.com/browse/JST-2090

They 'bought' this client.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com