Was blame removed from source tree? Or where did it move to?
Asked by sean harris:

EDIT: I unaccepted the accepted answer because while it's an answer, it's quite frankly unacceptable. It was renamed to "annotate" to be more "friendly" to sensitive developers. What a user un-friendly thing to do. Sure, just rename standard features... What Atlassian dev manager got so butt hurt to feel the need to change this??

I feel like I'm going crazy, I used to use blame all the time by right clicking a file and selecting blame but it's not there anymore. I'm using v2.7.1.![Screen Shot 2018-04-02 at 8.38.23 AM.png](/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/18412iF4FCAB732D927742/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screen Shot 2018-04-02 at 8.38.23 AM.png")


Answers:
author: Jorge
body: One more against annotate and in favour of blame.

Terrible decision. Lost 15 minutes searching for it.


author: Tiago Figueiredo
body: Seems like someone opened an issue suggesting "Annotate" be renamed back to "Blame". Vote on it to get the Source Tree team to hopefully notice it and revert this baffling change.  
<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BSERV-10886>


author: Bob Hallissy
body: So will you rename "Push" because it isn't nice to be pushy, and "Commit" because people who are committed are obviously radical fundamentalists? (all tongue-in-cheek, you understand)

I agree that this is about git semantics, and the term is "blame".

comments: author: mattneub
body: You left out "Conflict". We don't have conflicts. We have "Lack of consensus."


author: bgannin
body: We've renamed "Blame" to be a more user friendly "Annotate". Nobody is necessarily at fault, you're just figuring out who authored a particular line ? You're looking for "Annotate Selected..." in that menu, below "Log Selected...". HTH.

Brian Ganninger  
Senior Mac Developer, Sourcetree

comments: author: Nick Andren
body: This was a pretty frustrating change. "Annotate" and "blame" aren't even synonyms. I didn't even realize that it was the same feature until I stumbled across this post looking for why it was removed.


author: Aaron Waldman
body: I agree I just spent 30mins trying to figure out where "blame" feature went in the web ui!! At least its still there


author: Steven Albano
body: Yeah, having "Blame" removed has been like loosing a limb. I have periodically searched for it since it was renamed. Glad I finally went on a great hunt for it after another dev complained about it to me too.

It is blame in git, and it was blame in Bit Bucket since I started using it, so "Annotate" is not user friendly. I am not trying to annotate the code, I am trying to find who it is written by.

"Authorship", "Authors", "Attribution" or "Contributors" might have been discoverable, at least.

How was this tested?


author: Alex Toth
body: I will 2nd frustrating in not finding the 'blame' after it was renamed to "annotate". I use this feature quite alot not really to 'blame' someone, but find out who wrote the code and try to get their insights as to why they wrote it or how it works if its really complicated code. Originally got a laugh at the "blame" label name and thought it was named 'blame' as a inside joke between developers as its been my experience that most self respecting developers do not purposfully write trash code, but write code to the best of their ability and understanding.


author: Mladen Janjetovic
body: I think it should be "blame". It's not about UI semantic, it's about git semantic.


author: Tim Baker
body: I spent ages thinking it had gone and resorted to trying to find it once and for all. The most important thing is consistency, it is "blame" - although I agree it is not the most friendly name. At the very least a heads up of change on that page would help. Also, to make the point for devs moving over from GitHub, if it were me, I would very definitely think BitBucket simply didn't have it, which could put me off moving.


author: Mike P
body: It should be the same name as in Git. This change has been a nuisance.


author: Kendall Totten
body: This was a useless and frustration inducing change. I thought this feature was gone and had to google around to re-find it. Probably I will forget again because what I'm actually trying to do has nothing to do with the verb 'annotate'. That makes no sense.

Blame is the name of the function within git: <https://git-scm.com/docs/git-blame> so calling it something else in your app only means that users cannot find it anymore.

Code is not about #mahfeelz, and changing the name of the function to protect people's feelings is silly. Half the time you use git blame, you find your own past-self is to blame anyway. :P


author: henho818
body: I git-blame Atlassian for this user-unfriendly change. Oh I'm sorry, I mean I git-annotate Atlassian for this user-unfriendly change.


author: Mike P
body: :-) I like your point.


author: Stefan Georgiev
body: I just added 15 minutes to the total sum of lost time of people, looking for the old Blame. Not finding Blame as usual, hunting through the UI several times, starting to believe that \*I\* am blind or crazy, since it is unimaginable that Blame was not supported anymore, and then going to Google to finally land here!  
This renaming was not a nice thing to do, not at all.  
Also, having to make a small change to the file I want to Blame and save it, so it shows up in the UI where Blame ... uh, pardon "Annotate" is, has been a nuisance since I started using SourceTree.  
Disclamer: I like SourceTree, but things like this Annotate fiasco are just...


author: erikschumacher
body: What a horrible decision and waste of time for those of us who weren't aware of the change.


author: Peter Halverson
body: Atlassian dropped the ball, here. Regardless of whether the snowflakes in charge of UX thought "blame" wasn't PC, using "Annotate" was a bad choice. What were you guys thinking?


author: DAMcodeadmin
body: I agree that git blame is a poorly named feature, but I'm not sure "annotate" makes any sense for the context.

How about "trace", "track changes", or something like that? If the menu had read "trace" I could reasonably assume you meant git blame. "Annotate" is so semantically distant from what git blame does, I never even thought to click on it to try it. It sounds too much like the commenting features BitBucket already has.

Blame, while not culturally a great term, is at least semantically meaningful. I understand wanting to change "blame" into something else, but I would suggest a more appropriate term than "annotate".


author: Ken Ficara
body: Who does this? It's a standard command that every git user knows. Why not rename the "File" menu while you're at it, since the commands there actually all refer to repos, not files?


author: Martin VTN
body: This change needs removing I work in GitHub and Bit Bucket and constantly switching and looking for the Blame Tool when you have renamed it to a word that has absolutely nothing to do with the functionality is appalling behaviour and shows you don't actually care about the developers using your system, or Standards.


author: Zachary_Lebold
body: Are you seriously sticking to your guns on this inane decision?

The argument you give as to why you changed the term holds no water at all. "blame" is a technical term, independent of its English semantics. This kind of tongue-in-cheek humor is everywhere in programming, we all get used to it, no one's "at fault" for anything, and everyone makes mistakes. No one cares about the supposed negative connotation and the decision to change it to a less familiar term is by definition user-unfriendly. The subsequent silence on this issue from SourceTree developers is jaw-droppingly disappointing.

Sorry that I'm so frustrated, but this absolute nonsense has caused me and others on my team grief for no reason. I was convinced that blame hadn't been implemented. Have a good day, and please find some time to revert this change.


author: Denise Skidmore
body: This is a UI wrapper around an existing tool. The existing tool is blame. Advanced GIT users are going to be going back to GIT Bash and running command line tools and know the original names of the tools, and all the non-sourcetree documentation is going to be filed under the command line tool names, it's just confusing to change it.

If you want to allow the user to rename tools in settings, that's fine, but don't impose it on all the users coming from other GIT platforms. Our team is probably going to stick with GitEx rather than have to retrain the whole department on all the new names for everything.

"Annotate" doesn't even make sense, it's not a tool for adding notes to the code. "Attribute" might have been a better choice if you had to rename it.


author: jaytavares
body: I agree with others. 'Annotate' is not a very accurate label for the function of this button. 'Blame' worked well. Perhaps 'Author' could work as well...

comments: author: Denise Skidmore
body: Interesting, didn't even know annotate was a valid git-scm tool. But the GUI completely re-formats the output, so the output format differences are a moot point? And Blame is the more commonly used tool?


author: shadowsheep
body: They are not the same, it should be nice and geek to leave it as 'blame' \[-;

From: <https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-annotate>
> The only difference between this command and [git-blame\[1\]](https://www.git-scm.com/docs/git-blame) is that they use slightly different output formats, and this command exists only for backward compatibility to support existing scripts, and provide a more familiar command name for people coming from other SCM systems.


author: dgp
body: what a terrible decision.

This is a UI wrapper around an existing tool. The existing tool is blame.


author: aaron_tekton
body: Agreed. It should be 'blame.' I just figured SourceTree didn't have this feature until I came upon this post.


author: Kendall Totten
body: .

comments: author: Kendall Totten
body: Speaking of bad functionality, there's no way to move or even delete answers. If I choose edit and delete the text, it wont let me save. And there's no general delete link. Sigh.


author: mattneub
body: And there's no way to downvote an answer.