Repository Branches and Commits preview feedback

[patrick-knight]

Thanks for participating in feature preview for changes to the Branches and Commits pages.

Let us know your feedback here!

[lah7]

It's great to be able to select between a certain time and always see a counter for status checks. Thanks for that!

There are still some elements of the old layout I'd love to see: (I am also stubborn to UI changes, since it is what makes it "GitHub" for me)

• On the branches page, having the table header repeated per section feels a bit too much.
  • Suggest removing them for "Your branches" and "Active branches":
    
• On the commits page, I like how the old layout indented the day. The new design feels too "flat" that my eyes are dazzled finding what day it was 👀 Not sure if I'd ever need to collapse by the day though.
  

There are some bugs / minor things:

• Branch names are unnecessary truncated/overflowing (Firefox 118.0.2)
  
• The page <title> is simply Branches instead of Branches - [repo name].
• To maintain existing behaviour, please could the "check status" dialog not be modal? (I.e. click on the background to close)
• Think the font size in the branch selector menu is incorrect. Feels too large compared to other elements.
  • (Old: 12px, New: 14px)
• The button to open/close the commit message should probably be the same as the one on the Commits page for consistency:
  
  (Left = Original | Right = Beta)
• Not sure how I feel about the commit message being a sans serif font. I always see them as monospace (like in Git clients), but no big deal.

[hrach]

Yes, the commit list unified to one single box is really worse to read.

[ansballard]

Agree that the branch name truncation was too aggressive, we updated that width so those longer branch names should be more visible!

[yaSebastian]

@ansballard

Agree that the branch name truncation was too aggressive, we updated that width so those longer branch names should be more visible!

Can you consider extend the branch names' width even more? Maybe 10-20% more? We still have some truncated branch names and there is more than enough empty space right to it.

This is how it looks on my screen:

[yaSebastian]

On the branches page, having the table header repeated per section feels a bit too much.
Suggest removing them for "Your branches" and "Active branches":

I disagree with this. The current presentation (a table header for each section) reduces cognitive load, feels less crammed and is more visually appealing as it uses more screen real estate and separates the sections more clearly. (Of course this is a highly subjective opinion.)

[jsoref]

Personally, I'd rather: 🛡️ 📋 branch name ..... Updated ...

Having the 📋-to-copy button in a random location based on branch length kinda sucks.

By placing the 🛡️ to the left (as it's only occasionally present), it can go into a negative space and have minimal impact most of the time...

[Marcono1234]

One issue with the date picker:

1. Performing the selection in reverse (first end date, then start date) does not work properly:
   1. Select for example 23 October
   2. Hover your mouse over 15 October
      ℹ️ Note: It looks as if you could select the date range 15 - 23 October
   3. Click on 15 October
      ❌ Bug: Instead of selecting this date range, it cleared the selection of 23 October and 15 October is the start and you have to select an end date again

Two minor issues with the branches list:

1. The "Copy branch name to clipboard" hover text of the copy button on the branches page seems to render behind the outline / is cut off slightly on the left:
   
2. The shield icon on the branches page seems to act like a button (mouse cursor changes on hover), but there is no hover text and clicking it does not nothing:
   

Tested this on https://github.com/google/gson/branches

(using Firefox 118.0.2 (64-bit); Windows 10)

[AdamShwert]

Noted on the date picker issue - we agree that isn't ideal and will work to get it resolved!

[Marcono1234]

The date picker for commits seems pretty neat! One minor suggestion: Would it be possible to make selecting the month and year easier? For example similar to the Windows calendar shown from the taskbar where clicking on "October 2023" opens a month selection, and then clicking on the year opens a year selection.

Also the date dividers in the commits list might take a bit too much space, especially when there is often only one commit per day, then the date dividers take up nearly half the space of the page.

[Cbodfield]

Appreciate the feedback! You're not alone in wanting the month/year selector. We'll have that feature out shortly.

[Cbodfield]

The month/year selector for the date picker has been added!

[Marcono1234]

@Cbodfield, thanks!

Though it looks like the month selection for the current year is broken; it offers me "Oct" + future months "Nov" and "Dec", instead of "Oct" and any past months ("Jan", "Feb", ...):

[nwalters512]

Came here to share this feedback. Also, when clicking the left-facing arrow to go back a month, the month selector doesn't update to show what the month is.

[Cbodfield]

A fix for this went out yesterday. I missed an edge case trying to get it out quickly. 😅

Thanks for reporting it!

[Marcono1234]

Not sure if this is off-topic, but if you are currently working on the commits list anyways, would it be possible to also show tags on this list?

See #58544, #55024, #36114 and possibly more.

[hfhbd]

Yes please, I really miss this feature too to faster see which commit is included in which release.

[benediktwerner]

Commits page

The date picker seems neat.

The dialog when clicking on passed/failed checks should close when clicking on the backdrop.

Not sure I see the point of collapsing days since the page will usually only fit like 2 anyways and if it's more, they will be so short that collapsing them is also pointless.

And in the previous design, it was definitely much easier to see when the next day starts. Now, they blend in with the commits.

Also not sure how I feel about the new context menu on the right. I guess I don't use "browse repository at this point in time" that often but still sometimes and the other two options seem pretty useless. There's already a button to copy the commit and clicking the hash brings you to the commit details, so it seems quite unnecessary to add an extra click to this button. Although definitely not something I really care that much about.

[Cbodfield]

Thank you for the feedback! You're right we do have a little redundancy in that menu. We'll work on cleaning that up and we'll keep your other feedback in mind as we continue to improve the commits experience.

[pgaskin]

For the record, I disagree that "browse repository at this point" is useless, as it's one of the things I do frequently, especially in repositories with a lot of churn.

Regarding the context menu, if you aren't getting rid of it, it'd be nice to have a "compare commit to" option which allows you to select a commit to compare that commit with.

[Cbodfield]

We are actively exploring making commit range comparisons easier. It's not quite ready yet but it is likely to slot in to that context menu.

[H0llyW00dzZ]

Commits page

[+] add in pull request

[MHillier98]

On chrome 118, looks like the branch names are truncated for me too, which makes the name unusable for me as my company uses longer semantic names, including the type, jira ticket, etc. - eg feat/xxx-12345/new-thing-for-that-feature

[patrick-knight]

Hey @MHillier98 we rolled out a few tweaks to help with the truncation. Let us know if that helps

[tophf]

1px of box-shadow on the left of avatars is cut off in Chrome+Windows e.g. https://github.com/github/docs/commits/main/
Here's a zoomed-in screenshot:

[Cbodfield]

Good eye! Appreciate the feedback - we'll get that fixed

[Cbodfield]

This has been fixed - thanks again!

[Marcono1234]

Could the branches list please not only show linked pull requests but also linked issues?

Currently discovering whether a branch is linked to an issue does not seem to be easily possible.

[patrick-knight]

Hey @Marcono1234 thanks for the feedback, I'm curious to learn how you are using and referencing branches in issue?

[Marcono1234]

I have created GitHub issues in my repository to track a new feature I would like to implement or a bug to fix. For these I sometimes create a branch which contains experimental or incomplete changes, but since they are incomplete I did not create a pull request yet. And also, I am the owner of the repository so in general I am directly merging changes to main without first creating a pull request.

So in these cases I have a branch linked with an issue, but no pull request. I assume this is the use case for which linked branches were added as GitHub feature in the first place.

If I now look at the branches list, it would be useful to know if a branch is related to an issue so that I don't accidentally delete the branch because I think it is obsolete.

[Marcono1234]

@patrick-knight, is there any chance this will be added in the future? It feels a bit to me like the "linked branches" GitHub feature was overlooked as part of these changes.

Or should I raise this in #12290 or a new discussion?

[patrick-knight]

We don't have this planned at the moment.

[ony3000]

It would be nice if the date picker added a year selection feature and a button like "go to today"!

[Cbodfield]

Thanks for the feedback! The month/year selector in the date picker will be available soon

[Cbodfield]

This is available now - give it a whirl and if you have any more feedback let us know

[ony3000]

I checked it out and I like it! 😄

[Cbodfield]

On the commits side of things, we do have a user selector feature coming soon. We'll keep your feedback about that status checks location in mind as we continue working on this. Thanks for the feedback!

[jrvgr]

I think the new design for the commits page doesn't visualise as good as the old one that the commits are over the span of time, personally I would recommend at least keeping some aspect of the older timeline. I'm not persé against the accordion but it doesn't feel like I'm looking at a span of time as much now. I also think there's too much going on visually, making it feel very cluttered which for me makes it hard to keep track of what i'm looking at, thus providing a worse UX

[nielsvanvelzen]

It would be great if we could easily switch to a fork/upstream from the branches page. Especially useful for projects where developers work in the forks.

[patrick-knight]

When you say easily switch to a fork, can you help me understand a bit more about about what you had in mind?

[gsipos]

I used the branches page mostly to clean up branches that are merged and safe to delete. Now it is somehow harder to see a little bit, which branch has unmerged commits, and the delete button got moved into a menu, so it is harder to go over the stale branches and delete them "in bulk".

[bewuethr]

Additionally, the author's name is now hidden, and only the avatar is shown; bulk clean-up, for me, includes checking who worked on a branch. For example, if they have left our organization, a branch can be deleted; with the new layout, this is more difficult to see.

[dalberto]

Agreed, not being able to quickly clean up branches with 1-click delete is unfortunate.

[cmwinters]

👋 Hi all! This is really valuable feedback. 🙏

At GitHub, we have a design principle to add friction to destructive actions. That's why we put 'Delete' inside of a menu. The Commits list is a legacy page that hasn't been refactored in a long time, so that's why we're just now implementing this change.

For y'all, it seems like the most common scenario for going to the Branches page is to do bulk cleanup, so obviously this new design doesn't work well for that. 🤔

What if we added some more robust bulk action functionality? This is something we are looking at doing in the future:

[Fraetor]

Having some behaviour similar to git branch -d would be good. So low friction if the branch has been merged into main. Maybe it would even be possible to have some intelligence around squash merges?

[jsoref]

Using Chrome on Android, normally pages look like this:

https://github.com/jsoref/apache-arrow

The branches page loads like this:
https://github.com/jsoref/apache-arrow/branches

The white space spans the rest of the view. I can pinch to zoom, but it's really annoying.

[bewuethr]

Same as this, I believe?

[jsoref]

I'd love to be able to sort by commits ahead (or possibly commits behind).

The main thing I want is to be able to see all the branches that are +0 commits (and thus can probably be deleted).

[jsoref]

Yes. But I'm explicitly asking for sorting to address it as opposed to just saying I do it.

[yaSebastian]

The new search box's behavior and position do not match.

Given that the search box is below the categories tabs (Overview, Yours, Active, Stale, All branches), I would expect the search results to be limited to the active category. Instead, it searches all branches and switches to all.

So preferrably I'd suggest to either adjust the behavior or alternatively move the search box upwards, like this:

[TieWay59]

I'm not sure if here is a good place to ask, but I see the commit expansion is not very neat.

[lgarcia-tritier]

I guess this is the place to comment on this...

The commits page layout/UI just changed on me. The commit rows seem brighter, and larger and more spaced...having a hard time reading it. May I please have the more compact version back? Or at least please make it configurable? Sort of like Comfy vs Compact like Outlook does.

[janDsouza]

I can't seem to disable the new branches page even though I clicked on disable here, also as you can see, the left panel of preview features doesn't show the new branches page but it appears on the right. I also strongly push for increasing the width of the branch names, it's incredibly tough to hover and view each time

[Tobshub]

Don't.

[janDsouza]

Don't what? @Tobshub

[Tobshub]

This.

[abzy128]

I do know if it should be addressed or not, but applying custom styling makes commit icon circle to become oval shaped.
Saw it when activated Dark Reader extension (I know that GitHub already has Dark theme).

[J-PIE-314]

Issue:

On the repository page this row of buttons is no longer right-aligned as it should be.

Screenshots:

Original (right-aligned)

Feature Preview (incorrect)

[J-PIE-314]

This has been fixed, thank you.

Screenshot as of 9/29/2024:

[cdce8p]

Sorry for opening up an old discussion. I'm seeing a strange issue that's likely related to the new branches view. When I check Branches -> All exactly one branch is missing. It's quite difficult to notice so I wasn't sure if that's really happening but it all points to the new view.

In my case, for one repo I have pushed a total of 29 branches to Github. 20 are showing on the first page and 8 more on the second. Using Search branches ... the missing one, which should be the 21 (the first on the second page), does show up instantly.

[patrick-knight]

Is the "missing" branch a stale one?

[cdce8p]

Is the "missing" branch a stale one?

No, it's an active one. Those continue on the second page.

An interesting observation: The Active (and Yours) tab still lists it whereas it isn't on the All tab. However, the Default branch is missing from both the Active and Yours tab, whereas it is shown on the All tab. Maybe that isn't taken into consideration when calculating the offset for the db query?

[patrick-knight]

Do you mind opening a support ticket so we can get some additonal info that might not be public info and not suited for the community?

[patrick-knight]

Got it. Thank you, will get folks looking at it soon. 👀

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