SourceTree 1.2.1
SourceTree is a Git and Mercurial client (via @FogBugz). It seems to include all the expected features, including the ability to send diffs to BBEdit. Overall, I prefer the way Tower’s interface is designed. SourceTree’s seems busier, a bit unpolished, and it wants you to make wide windows. However, SourceTree also seems to be faster at showing diffs, and it can do some things that Tower can’t, such as blame view and per-file change logs (which, alas, do not seem to use --follow to track the history through moves and renames). After switching to Git about four years ago and using it via Terminal and some AppleScripts for a long time, it’s great to be able to choose from multiple good GUI clients (including Xcode 4). I plan to use several of them in concert going forward. The next thing I’d like is for the clients to let you search based on the changed source lines, rather than just the commit messages.
Update: Developer Steve Streeting replied to my e-mail almost immediately with this explanation:
I used to use --follow in an earlier version of SourceTree, until I discovered that, for now at least, this option is fundamentally flawed in Git, and it causes random dropping of log lines in many cases. This has been reported here for example.
I don’t know if git has any plan to fix this, but I disabled it a few point releases ago because it was doing more harm than good (at least the lack of history over rename is predictable). I intend to add a new option to the dialog to selectively allow users to re-enable it when they need it, so that hopefully you can get the information back in those cases without it randomly breaking other logs.
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I added git's pickaxe search to my fork of GitX. http://brotherbard.com/blog/2010/09/gitx-update/
Germán Laullón (and others) have added more features on top of mine and you can find the latest at http://gitx.laullon.com/
@Nathan I’ll check that out; thanks. I had sworn off using forks of GitX because of random problems, but it’d be worth it to keep it around just for pickaxe.
I really wanted to get pickaxe search into SourceTree 1.2.1 but I ran out of time. It's high on my list, expect it to make an appearance soon :)
[...] I wrote about SourceTree, I mentioned that I wanted a Git client that could search the content of the changed source lines. [...]
Just to let you know that I just added git pickaxe support to SourceTree 1.2.2 which will be released later today (to direct customers, App Store review likely to take about a week).
Hope that helps!
Steve
[...] improving it. It’s one of my primary development tools, alongside Xcode and BBEdit. I do use SourceTree for certain kinds of searches, [...]
[…] file history view is still not as good as SourceTree’s, and it has actually gotten worse. Before, there was a list of […]
