
Introducing SourceTree for Windows – a free desktop client for Git - Lightning
http://blog.bitbucket.org/2013/03/19/introducing-sourcetree-git-client-microsoft-windows/
======
mrweasel
Git AND MERCURIAL client. There's not a single decent Mercurial client on
Windows. EasyMercurial is better than nothing, but not by much.

We a few .Net projects, (we mainly do Python), some of the projects we haven't
even bothered moving from Subversion, because of the lack of good Windows
Mercurial clients.

Having SourceTree on both Mac and Windows is huge to us.

EDIT: Just realized that they didn't include Mercurial support yet. Then I
don't care at all.

~~~
grandpoobah
TortoiseHg is an awesome Mercurial client, what are you talking about?

~~~
X-Cubed
I can't speak for mrweasel, but in my experience, TortoiseHg struggles with
performance on large repos, with basic operations (like refreshing the list of
modified files in the Commit window) taking many seconds to complete. It
consumes a lot of memory while idle (around 500MB on my machine), often
becomes unresponsive or crashes, progress bars only represent the lowest level
operations, not overall progress (eg: checking out a repo containing subrepos
results in the bar going from start to finish several times), etc, etc.

It's not terrible by any means, but I'm interested to see what other clients
can bring to the party.

~~~
dgesang
Excessive TortoiseHG user here. Many rather large repos with multiple
branches, tags, forks, etc. All hg processes together take less than 130 MB
RAM. I don't recall having any crash at all in the last few years, nor did it
become unresponsive, not even on my old TP60 (2007).

------
mountaineer
I installed it a couple weeks ago, and I would not recommend this yet. I have
appreciated the frequent and easy update process during the beta. But, wow,
still a long ways to go performance-wise. In the working copy view, where I
spend the most time in ST, most clicks take seconds to respond. I'm optimistic
it improves, I've been a fan of the Mac version for a while.

~~~
sjstreeting
Please could you give us some details about your circumstances & repo at
<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREEWIN> ? I test with quite a few repos
and your performance experience with the Win beta is unusual - viewing files
in the working copy should usually average well under a second. Do you have
very large diffs for example? Info about the repo you are testing with would
be very useful, especially if it's public. The Mac version of ST went through
a lot of tuning over the years so we'll probably have a bunch to do on Windows
too, your assistance would be welcome :)

Steve Streeting, SourceTree dev @ Atlassian

~~~
rogerbinns
Some feedback for you since you probably wouldn't find out in other ways. I
used the Mac version for a while comparing against the Github client.
SourceTree then insists you register to continue use which isn't unreasonable.
However registration wanted me to create an atlassian account of some sort
that looked like a really crappy bug tracker (ie yet another username and yet
another password on yet another site that I had no intention of using). So I
gave up and kept using the Github client (and the command line mostly). I had
expected registration to amount to a one off name and address kind of thing.

------
pnathan
I have ST on my Mac. It's a pretty beefy machine - i7, 4gb of ram. And it runs
like a lazy dog in a hot August day in North Carolina, i.e., very slowly.

I really wish it'd be sped up and I sincerely hope that the Windows version is
massively faster.

~~~
Tomdarkness
I use ST frequently on OSX and can't say I've personally encountered any
slowness. Are there any specific actions you find slow?

~~~
pnathan
Pretty much everything. Slow to load, slow to refresh, slow dialog boxes.

Other stuff on my system is quite fast.

~~~
sjstreeting
The usual reason for slowness on OS X is one of the following:

1\. Lack of HDD space (10%+ is benchmark to keep OS X's dynamic defrag happy)
2\. Low memory - ST has to launch git & hg binaries and low memory affects
those tasks especially 3\. Running Mercurial on the App Store version on 10.8
- this is a little esoteric but it's down to Python precompilation and slight
differences in versions. You can resolve that by using the system Mercurial
instead of the embedded one for now.

------
nahname
Why not the command line? One look at that UI and I cannot fathom why it needs
all those buttons.

push, pull, checkout, add, commit. I can go days just using those five
commands.

~~~
andypants
It has some useful features that I find easier to use in a gui than using
command line.

For example, being able to see a summary of diffs of all staged and unstaged
files, and being able to select particular lines of the diffs and
stage/unstage/undo them. Or being able to see commits and diffs from other
peoples' branches before I pull them.

Honestly, a gui is pretty useful for git, especially when you're doing
operations that you want to apply to many specific files in different folders.

> push, pull, checkout, add, commit. I can go days just using those five
> commands.

You're missing out on a few git features then.

I agree some of the buttons are useless, like adding or removing files. The
main window has a list of staged and unstaged files and I just drag and drop
files between the two window panes. I've never had to use those buttons
before.

~~~
nahname
>You're missing out on a few git features then.

Including diff, which I forgot, what else do you use everyday?

~~~
andypants
log, branch, merge, mv, rm, status, fetch, reset

Some more that aren't used everyday, but certainly quite often

~~~
nahname
Oh, can't believe I forgot to include status.

------
winter_blue
Is there anything like this for Linux?

And has anyone managed to get this up and running with Wine/PlayOnLinux?

~~~
johncoltrane
SmartGitHG's name sucks hard but it's close to SourceTree feature-wise:
<http://www.syntevo.com/smartgithg/index.html>

~~~
kyrra
SmartGitHG is a nice alternative, but it does cost money ($79), while
SourceTree is being given away for free (as a way to push BitBucket).

I would love to see a Linux version of SourceTree, but it may be a while. As
was pointed out by one of their employees before, they write each application
as a native app for each OS to provide the best possible experience, so adding
a new OS means adding a lot of work.

------
pjmlp
Great work!

Nice to see companies investing into desktop applications.

~~~
PallarelCoedr
And it's a WPF one too.

~~~
ditoa
I don't really see that as a plus. Qt would have been my choice but oh well.

------
twodayslate
I'm pretty new at git and only use github. Why should I use this over the
official github client? The official app is pretty easy to use and makes sense
to me.

~~~
aviraldg
The official Github client is severely crippled and allows you to do little
more than clone repos and make commits. This is a full-blown Git client.

~~~
twodayslate
I guess I do use the app and the actual website. I don't know what I am
missing.

~~~
sthatipamala
Git does not equal Github. SourceTree allows you to use most of the features
of Git (the program). The official Github client lets you use some of the
features of Git (the program) but is mostly an interface for Github (the
website).

By their own admission, the Github client does away with the majority of Git
features. If you want to find out what you're missing: <http://git-
scm.com/book>

------
chbrosso
Sounds like good news for making Git stuff easier on Windows platform. Git
Extensions is pretty good, but can be intimidating for the unexperienced.

~~~
mountaineer
Agreed, I have team members that are still struggling with Git after 6 months
because of issues remembering the right command line and needing to jump back
and forth between CLI and Git Extensions for various use cases. Having one
interface will make their lives easier. I'm hopeful for a performance boost
from ST before I recommend it though.

------
jobigoud
We are using Git Extensions at work
(<http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/>). What would be the interesting new
features if we switched to SourceTree ?

~~~
drawkbox
The ability to connect up to Git and Mercurial repos. Very nice when working
with bitbucket for private repos (git/mercurial) and github (git) for public
from one app.

------
kayoone
I have been using TortoiseGit for years on Windows and thinks its pretty good,
didnt really need more but ill give SourceTree a try as i like the OSX version
of it.

~~~
vyrotek
Have you tried GitExtensions? I originally tried TortoiseGit after having used
TortoiseSVN for years but it never felt quite right. But, now I'm thinking of
switching to SourceTree. :)

------
elbelcho
I've been using the private beta for a few weeks now and it is a fantastic
product. I've become a huge fan of BitBucket and SourceTree over the last
month.

------
SigmundA
Looks good, except requires .Net 4.5 which we currently have an embargo on
here for our dev machines since it replaces .Net 4.0 rather than side by side.

~~~
heartbreak
Out of curiosity, what piece(s) of 4.5 have you found aren't backwards
compatible with 4.0 anyway?

~~~
topbanana
We've experienced problems too. I really wish they'd just gone with a side by
side release.

Here's the full list of breaking changes [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/hh367887(v=vs.110).a...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/hh367887\(v=vs.110\).aspx)

~~~
Glide
Eh we hit a bug here with WCF discovery when we had the machines run 4.0 code
and had 4.5 installed.

I think the official fix has been out, but man did it cause some headaches.

------
JVIDEL
Nice, how about porting it to Linux? last time I tried to use a git gui there
I wanted to read a visual basic book, then commit seppuku

~~~
sandyarmstrong
What did you try? gitg was a pretty nice gitx clone when I used to work in
desktop linux

------
porker
Bugger. Windows 7+.

I've had Windows 7 sitting on the shelf since the day it launched, but haven't
get got round to installing it...

~~~
dreen
It really makes me wonder what is that they're using that doesn't work for
older Windows...

~~~
netcraft
I think it installed .net framework 4.5 - which according to Wikipedia is
vista and above. And I bet they just didn't care to support vista.

------
EugeneOZ
Free for beta, but what about prices in general?

~~~
jstepka
SourceTree has been free since joining Atlassian. We'll continue to keep the
product free as part of our Bitbucket platform to help developers adopt Git
and Mercurial.

Cheers, Justen -- Bitbucket & SourceTree product manager

~~~
netcraft
I want to thank you for a great product and a perfect price point. Not to look
a gift horse in the mouth, but any chance of open sourcing it in the future?

~~~
jstepka
Thanks for using SourceTree!

We distribute source for JIRA, Stash, etc if you're a paying license holder
for better plugin development. This is something we'll be sure to review if we
add plugin support to SourceTree in the future.

------
j_s
If you're willing to live slightly dangerously, you can help Plastic SCM test
their [Windows-friendly] Git integration:
[http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2013/03/gitsync-is-out-
na...](http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2013/03/gitsync-is-out-native-
windows-dvcs.html)

~~~
chbrosso
Note that it isn't a real Git client, but a communication layer between a
PlasticSCM repo and a remote git repository.

------
BuddhaSource
Thank you, thank you & thank you! There is nothing better than this for code
review & git management for team.

I love this on Mac but had to compromise on Windows! Looking forward for
ubuntu too someday :). Great job guys!

------
swah
Does it excel at anything, particularly? I still use a mix of command-line git
and winmerge. (And I'm willing to try GUI tools, but Git has so many commands
and options it becomes complex to know what you're doing in a GUI tool).

------
bitcartel
The original SourceTree for Mac is a native Cocoa app. If this Windows version
has been written in C# it could potentially be ported to Linux with Mono and
GTK#/Qyoto. Perhaps the future is one single cross-platform app?

~~~
far_far_away
I hope not. I like SourceTree the way it is (on OS X) and every cross platform
UI toolkit I know produces apps that don't feel native.

IMHO Bitbucket/Atlassian is doing it the right way: Native on the client side.

~~~
bitcartel
Check out Xamarin Studio. It's a full blown IDE and it's quite impressive in
terms of native feel. Apparently written in C#, Mono and GTK#.

<http://xamarin.com/studio>

------
knkella
Finally something that developers using Windows want. Command-line is good,
but when it comes to Windows I think people expect to have some GUI in place
for all tools. Great work!

------
phormula
I prefer to use TortoiseGit. I dont know why ont would want to open a gui
client, I prefer the commands integrated nicely into the shell

~~~
manojlds
TortoiseGit completely abstracts away the concept of index. Great for those
moving from TortoiseSVN. Horrible for git users.

~~~
tracker1
As a TortoiseSVN user, I still think TortoiseGit is horrible period...

------
nayefc
The command line is the best "client". I think.

------
meemo
I liked the previous icon set better. I don't see why there's a sudden
aversion to color among developers. And why shapes have to be simplified.

------
GhotiFish
Is it open source? I notice the article mentions the word free _6 times_
(!!!!) while discussing this client.

Which is a strong indicator that it is doing horrible things.

~~~
erikvanzijst
Free as in beer.

