SourceTree

SourceTree is offered for free by Atlassian to Windows and Mac OS X users all over the world. What is this tool and what can it do? To put it simply, it is a Git (distributed revision control and source code management system) and Mercurial (distributed revision control tool for software developers) client. With SourceTree by your side you will be able to keep everyone on the team up to date and help the developers on your team be more productive.

As mentioned above, SourceTree is available for Microsoft’s Windows operating system and for Apple’s Mac OS X. SourceTree will work with any Windows edition from Windows 7 onward. SourceTree will work with any OS X edition from 10.6 Snow Leopard onward.

A setup wizard will help you install SourceTree on a machine powered by Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The wizard will automatically detect a Git and Mercurial install; if Git and Mercurial are not installed on your PC, the wizard will offer to download an embedded version of Git/Mercurial for SourceTree alone to use.

When the installation process completes you will be presented with a Welcome prompt. This is another wizard that invites you to go through the initial setup: enter user info (full name, email address), pick one of two options for the SSH client configuration (PuTTY/Plink or OpenSSH), connect to a hosting service (Bitbucket, Stash, github).

You will find the following on SourceTree’s list of features: clone/add/create repository; manage multiple repositories, local or hosted; create patch, apply patch; launch SSh agent; open in terminal; resolve conflicts; add remote, add submodule; undo and redo; support for multiple hosting services; review outgoing and incoming changesets; create, clone, commit, push, pull, merge, and more.

SourceTree is free software. But unless you register, you cannot use the application for more than 30 days. Registering is free and will not take long.

The simple truth of the matter is that SourceTree is a properly good and quite useful Git and Mercurial client.