Latest GitHub client for Windows and MacOS smoothes context switching and tightens integration with GitHub pull requests Credit: Thinkstock GitHub Desktop 2.0, an upgrade to the GitHub client for Windows and MacOS, adds support for rebasing and stashing to allow context switches and keeping a commit history clean, respectively. The goal behind GitHub Desktop 2.0, GitHub noted, is to help teams to work together and support common development patterns. Capabilities featured in Desktop 2.0 include: Stashing, which addresses a situation in which developers can be in the middle of reproducing and fixing a bug and need to temporarily switch context. A developer not ready to commit work can bring changes to a new Git branch or keep them in a current branch. Rebasing, for use when a developer may prefer a clean commit history without merging commits. Developers used to merging branches can still use the same workflow, but those working in a repository where they do not want to merge commits can use rebasing to maintain a clean commit history. Based on GitHub’s Electron desktop app framework, GitHub Desktop was written in TypeScript and uses the React JavaScript UI library. Since GitHub Desktop 1.0, released as open source in September 2017, GitHub has added team-oriented capabilities including the ability to select a co-author of a commit by mentioning their GitHub user name, and pushing work to GitHub with the suggested next step. Future plans call for more capabilities to surface context from GitHub, with GitHub taking an initial step by tightly integrating pull requests between GitHub and GitHub Desktop. You can download GitHub Desktop from the project website. Version Control SystemsSoftware Development