GitHub Desktop has been updated and now has expanded support for drag and drop to allow you to squash and reorder commits in your history, amend previous commits, and start new branches from earlier commits. GitHub Desktop gives developers a way to work with workflows in a desktop environment.

GitHub Desktop was designed to replace GitHub for Mac and Windows with a unified experience across both platforms. Recent updates have added support for cherry-picking and introduced drag and drop. The developers say the latest release has:

'more of Git in it so you can focus on what matters'.

The headline improvement to this release is the ability to squash and reorder commits. The thinking behind the change is that developers use their commit history to tell a coherent story about the progression of their project. If a group of commits represents a single unit of work, or if a project requires that each pull request only has one commit, you can now drag them on top of one another to squash them together and add a new commit message to summarize the overall changes. There's also the option to squash and rebase when you merge as part of the operation, and commits can be dragged and dropped to make the history of the project clearer and easier to follow.

The second change of note is the option to start a new branch from an earlier commit. The GitHub Desktop team says this will be useful when developers need to check out an older version of a project to investigate a bug or create a hotfix on top of the latest release. You can now check out a new branch from any commit in a projects history and avoid causing problems for the branch you’re working on.

Another improvement is the ability to amend your last commit rather than having to undo it if you want to make a small change. The final improvement adds native support for Apple Silicon users. 

GitHub Desktop 2.8 is available on GitHub now.

More Information 

GitHub Desktop

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