Hi! We’ve been using Plastic SCM (Team/Enterprise Edition, with an on-premises server) since 2015.
Plastic SCM is now rebranded to “Unity (DevOps) Version Control” and lately, we’ve been still using the “legacy UI” since the “new UI” was missing important features from the old one. However, in one of the latest Plastic SCM updates the legacy UI was deprecated and removed entirely.
The removal of the legacy UI is unfortunate from our perspective - while there are some great new features in the new UI, it’s still missing many features from the legacy UI that were important to us:
In the new Mergetool, there are no keyboard shortcuts for resolving conflicts (i.e for toggling to keep/discard the lines from src/base/dst respectively).
In the Branches view, the “Tree view” option is missing, making a large hierarchical branch structure appear only as a (very long) flat list.
After restarting the GUI, and after switching between Workspaces, the following views do not remember which (Advanced) filter was last active: Changesets, Branches, Labels, Attributes and Code Reviews. (NOTE: We have our own Attribute filters that we always want to use by default, for Branches and Code Reviews.)
When switching between Workspaces (or restarting the GUI), the last active view in each workspace is not remembered - which makes for an unnecessary amount of clicking whenever we are jumping back and forth between a couple of repos (which we often do).
The display of branch@repo@server at the top, next to the workspace selector, does not include the full (hierarchical) branch name (except when hovering). That makes it harder to see full context at a glance.
In the Code Reviews list there is no longer any different color coding of lines, based on Code Review status: Under review / Rework required / Reviewed.
The Navigator / “minimap” option is missing from Branch Explorer - we find it valuable for overview and navigation.
These were all great usability / workflow features that are now all of a sudden missing, since we can no longer access the legacy UI. Getting stuck on an old version is not really an option. We hope that re-implementing these missing features has a high prio on your roadmap.
Thanks for this post!
Fully agree on essentially all points.
Add to this important missing context menu entries, such as:
access to the “show history” for files in a comparison window (such as after double-clicking a changeset)
“show this changeset in the branch explorer” (as in, “switch to the branch explorer, and focus on that changeset”) from essentially any element dealing with changesets (=history window, changesets list, and so on).
And a really helpful feature that never even made it into the Legacy GUI, DESPITE the exact same functionality already being available in the “show history as 2D tree” feature:
show changeset numbers below the changeset dots in the branch explorer
Oops, the above point I made was actually invalid - I had missed the “Set as default query” button that is still present in the new UI, under Advanced - Query in these views. (Possibly I missed it because the default query did not seem to be carried over from the legacy UI to the new UI?)
No more tabs
It’s graphically slow (network wise seems the same)
I cant get the proxy server to work anymore either, I can’t even find where to put the server address in the latest update
Codice really pooped the bed when they went down the new UI route. Go back to the old interface and scrap this piece of crap.
Thank you for the feedback.
I already talked with @goranw about most of these issues and forwarded them to the PMs and Dev team.
I will share this thread with them too, so feel free to add anything you need.
On top of that, we have an option at the bottom of the cards in the public roadmap where you can submit those requests, aggregating them, so that they can be properly triaged and prioritized:
The randomly assigned user colors (as shown in the Profile, the History windows, etc.) are currently completely separate from the “old”, manually configurable user colors that are stored in branchexplorerusercolors.conf:
Also, many of these new “random” colors are completely identical, making it even less useful, and to my knowledge, these colors cannot be configured/adjusted.
There is at least one very vital keyboard shortcut missing: currently there is no way to switch to the next/previous difference in the diff windows, except for using the mouse:
All cross-links to show a specific changeset/item in the branch explorer are missing from the context menus, for example:
in the Changesets tab
in the Branches tab
in the Labels tab (this one is kinda important)
in any sub-window related to changesets (history, changesets-in-a-branch, …)
Currently, the only way to find such a changeset in the branch explorer is, to remember the changeset number, manually switch to the branch explorer, and then enter the changeset number in the quicksearch field (and then double-checking that the quicksearch actually landed on the correct changeset, and not on some other changeset that happens to pattern-match with the number in its name/comment/branch (or be forced to type an additional “cs:” in front of the number))…
Hierarchical tree views pretty much everywhere are an absolute must. Please, the flat file list is killing me! We have a bunch of ignored files and every time I make changes, add files or packages, I have to turn on show ignored to make sure nothing I actually want is being ignored and It shows every single ignored file mixed in with the others, listed separately. It makes each checkin an absolute chore now that takes 100x longer than it used to.
Thanks for your feedback. In your case, you are missing a tree view in the “Pending Changes” view of the Plastic GUI, right?
Were you previously using the legacy GUI on Windows?
