I see the option available in the "Changes" menu of both the Log window and the Changes window

Found it -- "Compact Change Display" in the Changes menu, starting in version 17.1 preview 10.

Another idea: with an index, it might be possible to cache off some of the information that DeepGit provides (e.g. code migration across renamed files, etc) so that it's quickly available within the normal Blame functionality.

+1 for implementing this. However, I too cannot figure out how to enable this option. I've checked the 5 different settings dialogs that I know about but didn't see anything obvious.

Maybe it's a hidden config setting not accessible via UI?

What does this mean ? If nobody else made it you should not try to make SmartGIT better than other tool ?

What I meant was "if some other tool does this better/'correctly', we can examine its behavior and use that as a concrete example of what SmartGit should/could do".

"Maybe if the user selects (not check) a branch name in the Branches tab you could highlight the associated path in the commit tab."

 -- This in itself would be very useful IMO

"I give up... 

Many users report that the log window lacks a feature that would help to identify branches in the history of a GIT repo and you guys keep saying that this feature won't be useful and can not be done."

-- Clearly this is not a trivial problem, else I'm sure the SmartGit team would happily implement it. Everyone has suggestions, but each one has flaws.

Given that, perhaps a more productive approach would be to try and find an existing tool other than SmartGit that appears to handle this correctly / better for Git repositories. Has anyone found such a tool?

I too would like to see it as an option when you right-click on a stash. I.e. you do "apply subset of files from stash" and then it opens up a dialog allowing you to select which files you want (with an additional option to "select all" or "select none", as a starting point for adding/removing specific files)

Perhaps it is not the branch line coloring that people find confusing, but rather the layout itself? For comparison, there's a request open for horizontal layout ("Possibility to show the "Log" from left to right"); a comment in that bug shows how Perforce's Revision Graph tackles complicated branching structures using a horizontal layout.

Not a problem. I've gathered the requested data and emailed it to you as requested. Thanks for investigating!

I should note that the numbers above came from an 8-core 12GB VM running Windows 10 build 1607 with full hardware resources devoted to the VM. If necessary I can re-run the same tests on the host (a late-2016 MacBook Pro).