Vscode Gitlens: v17.1.0 Release

Added

• Adds AI-powered "Explain" commands for work-in-progress (WIP) changes, commits, stashes, and branches
  • Adds Explain Branch Changes (Preview), Explain Changes (Preview), and Explain Working Changes (Preview) actions to branches, commits and stashes, and WIP, respectively in the Commit Graph
  • Adds Explain Branch Changes (Preview) and Explain Changes (Preview) actions to branches, commits and stashes in the other GitLens views
  • Adds an ✨ Explain button to the editor and status bar blame hovers
  • Adds an ✨ Explain button above the commit message in the Inspect view which replaces the Explain panel
  • Adds Explain Branch Changes (Preview) and Explain Working Changes (Preview) (when applicable) actions to the ... menu on the Home view
  • Adds Explain Branch Changes (Preview), Explain Commit Changes (Preview), Explain Stash Changes (Preview), and Explain Working Changes (Preview) actions to the Command Palette
• Adds updated AI provider and model support for GitLens' AI features
  • Adds Ollama and OpenRouter support (#3311, #3906)
  • Adds Google Gemini 2.5 Flash (Preview) model, and OpenAI GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, GPT-4.1 nano, o4 mini, and o3 models (#4235)
  • Adds support for Azure AI (OpenAI-compatible) models
  • Adds support for custom OpenAI-compatible providers (#4263)
  • Adds gitlens.ai.enabled setting to disable all AI-powered features
  • Adds a walkthrough for AI features
• Adds an all-new Visual History, a powerful evolution of the Visual File History, providing a dynamic and insightful visualization of your repository's history, offering flexibility to explore changes across files, folders, branches, and your entire project
  • Visualize the history sliced by author (the default) or by branch (when applicable), providing different perspectives on contributions and development lines
  • Slicing by author allows you to see the contributions of each author over time
  • Slicing by branch allows you to see unmerged commits on parallel development lines — only available when viewing the history of all branches of a file or folder
  • Use the zoom/pan functionality to focus on specific timeframes or areas of interest via mouse wheel or zoom buttons
  • Adds a breadcrumb navigation bar, with branch switcher and file/folder picker, allowing you to easily navigate the history of files, folders, branches, or the entire repository
  • Hold Alt or Shift when clicking on the breadcrumbs to open the repository or folder in a new tab
  • Adds the configuration popover to customize the visualization, including the branch or all branches, timeframe, and how to slice the history
  • Adds a scrubber bar to provide an almost time-lapse view for navigating through the changes introduced with each commit in history
  • Adds Visualize Repo History and Visualize Branch History actions to the Home view
  • Adds Show Visual History command to the Command Palette
• Adds the ability to change a branch's merge target in Home view. (#4224)
• Adds enhanced integration with Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, and Bitbucket Data Center to support associated accounts and pull requests on commits (#4192)
• Adds the ability to search for GitHub Enterprise and GitLab Self-Managed pull requests by URL in Launchpad
• Adds enhanced and improved accuracy and performance of the revision navigation (#4200)
  • Adds support for navigating line ranges in addition to individual lines
• Adds "changes" statistics for stashes in the Commit Graph
• Adds Open File at Revision from Remote command to open the specific file revision from a remote file URL
• Adds Copy SHA action to editor hovers
• Adds avatars to the hidden Branch / Tags popover in the Commit Graph

Changed

• Changes the display of autolinks in the Inspect and Commit Graph Inspect views (#4286).
  • Replaces the autolinks panel with a new compact "footer" bar below the commit message
• Optimizes (rewrote) Git execution and parsing for significantly improved performance, especially with large repositories, and reliability
  • Improves contributor fetching performance, especially for large repositories, and adds more advanced data for contributor statistics
  • Improves performance of loading data for the Commit Graph
  • Improves cancellation support in many Git operations for better responsiveness and system resource usage
  • Adds gitlens.advanced.commits.delayLoadingFileDetails setting to delay loading full commit file details until required to improve performance even more for large repositories
• Improves Commit Graph rendering performance, re-rendering avoidance, and selection responsiveness
  • Switches the Commit Graph webview to use Lit and upgraded to React 19 for the graph component
  • Improves commit search performance and reliability, epecially when paging in new results
• Improves branch name autolink matching logic for better accuracy and fewer false positives (#3894)
• Improves commit search accuracy and performance both in the Search & Compare view and the Commit Graph
• Improves commit searches in the Search & Compare view to show only the matching files for file or change-based searches
• Improves commit searches in the Search & Compare view to show matching stashes
• Improves accuracy and performance of the File History and Line History views
• Improves performance of the Contributors view, especially with large repositories
  • Adds a configurable gitlens.views.contributors.maxWait timeout setting for fetching contributors to avoid potentially long waits
• Improves GitHub integration authentication check performance, when the authentication extension is disabled or unavailable (Cursor, Windsurf, etc) (#4065)
• Improves AI model adherence to provided custom instructions (#4267)
• Changes cherry-pick command no longer use/open a terminal (#3531)
• Improves date setting descriptions (#3953)

Fixed

• Fixes an error that can occur when retrieving the active repository, such as when the current file is not part of a repository.
• Fixes cache collision between issues and PRs in autolinks (#4193)
• Fixes incorrect PR Link Across Azure DevOps Projects (#4207)
• Fixes detail view incorrectly parses GitHub account in commit message (#3246)
• Fixes timed out waiting for authentication provider to register in GitLens after update to version 16.3 (#4065)
• Fixes cloud integration sessions not refreshing when they expire mid-session (#4240)
• Fixes "Delete Worktree" doing nothing when the default worktree is already open in another window (#4232)
• Fixes some cases in which Azure DevOps queries fail or return unexpected results (#4271)
• Fixes element with id is already registered for commit searches in the Search & Compare view
• Fixes hierarchical compaction in file trees (e.g., a parent folder disappearing if a subfolder with a similar name exists)
• Fixes cherry-pick commit ordering by falling back to author date if committer date matches
• Fixes issues when using older versions of Git (>= Git 2.7.2)
• Fixes cases where rename detection was not working properly

Removed

• Deprecates the gk-target-base Git configuration key

Engineering

• Bumps eslint-plugin-import-x to v4.10.5 — thanks to PR #4236 by JounQin (@JounQin)