Suggestion - Lecture 34--Installing SourceTree on Mac

[Morgaine_Christensen]

I posted something similar over on the Q&A but am reposting it here because I think it is important, especially beginners for the course.

My experience of installing SourceTree on a Mac was frustrating. Being new and a Mac User, it is somewhat intimidating trying to install and use unfamiliar software, when you have no clue whether you are installing correctly. At some point, would you kindly add another video how to do this operation on a Mac? Or, barring that, would you please include a set of slides with images showing the installation process in the Resources of the video Lecture?

With a lot of hit and miss, I was able to get SourceTree installed…I hope. However, when you open SourceTree on a Mac, all you see is a very simple screen (see below), which is far far different than the PC screen shown in the video. Once you figure out you need to create your “new” project on this screen, double click on the project after it is created, then it will finally open to work area similar to what is shown in the video. Visually, for a Mac User, it is feels like you are having to do an additional step in order to just open SourceTree. This is fine but certainly was unexpected.

Sadly, when SourceTree finally opens, the default view only shows your unstaged files on the left. You do not see the nice layout you see in the the current lecture video as as shown below. I don’t even know remember what I just did fiddling around to finally get this similar layout.

After mindless fiddling, I think I have gotten it to look similar to what Ben has in the lectures.

Please save other Mac Users some possible stress and needless frustration by including either Resource slides or separate video tutorial to help with installation of SourceTree.

Thank you for your assistance!

[ossifrage]

It took me a while to sort this out too. To get the split view, you need to click the menu icon just below where it says Stash at the top of the window, and choose Split view staging.

I wasn’t able to make Sourcetree display the buttons that appear in the staging area of the Windows version (“Stage All”, “Stage Selected”, etc.). However, clicking the checkbox next to “Unstaged files” moved everything to the “Staged files” area, and I was then able to commit by clicking the button up at the top left of the window.

Presumably it’s possible to stage files individually by clicking the checkbox adjacent to each file in the unstaged files area.

[_George]

I wish I’d seen this before I spent ages fiddling around in exactly the same way… I agree it would be helpful to flag in the video how different this looks when you try to install on a mac.

[Rob]

@ben / @Rick_Davidson

[Christian_Madsen]

This has been very helpful, but when I ignored the files under the library folder on Mac, I couldn’t find a .gitignore file that was created. Did you have a similar issue and was it resolved?

[nexusblue]

Thanks for posting this. It really helped me out!