GitHub has finally introduced a feature everyone was asking for: the File Tree View in the Pull Request experience!
It may seem like a small thing, but in fact this makes a huge difference to the productivity in a PR.
Video
As usual, if you are a visual learner, or simply prefer to watch and listen instead of reading, here you have a very quick video on how to activate this feature.
Link to the video: https://youtu.be/OfICx2_oVo0
If you rather prefer reading, well... let's just continue :)
What is the File Tree View
If you are familiar with the GitHub Pull Request experience, this is what you normally see:
It represents a list of changes that have been made to the files included in the Pull Request. This list, however useful, is flat and as such it doesn't help you understanding how many files have been touched and where they belong to.
The new Pull Request Experience with the File Tree View, instead, enhance that screen, helping with visualizing the full structure of the files affected by the PR:
As you can see the whole file and folder structure is added to the left hand side of the screen
The new view also shows if a file has been modified (yellow mark), or added (green sign).
This is really cool, and something that has been lacking in GitHub for a long time.
How to Enable the File Tree View in your Pull Requests
At the moment of writing this post, the new File Tree view is still in preview.
To activate it, you can go to your Profile Settings, and select Feature Preview.
In here, you will see a new Pull Request File Tree option. Click on it, and then click on Enable.
Now you can go back to your PR screen, refresh it, and the new view will show in all its beauty 🥳🥳🥳
Conclusions
What do you think of this new feature? Were you waiting for it? Let me know in the comments below.
Also, if you want to see how you should manage your Pull Requests, check out this video here.
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Top comments (2)
I was somewhat surprised reading your article to find out that GitHub didn’t do that! We use GitLab at my work and this, as far as I can remember has always been a feature. It’s brilliant to quickly navigate down the source tree when reviewing MRs and something I use often
Yea it’s something that has been lacking in GH for long long time… not sure why…
But hey, now we have it there too 😉