Local branches missing in Sourcetree when I exceed about 300

[Zack Morris]

Hi, the turndown arrow by the BRANCHES item in the left sidebar disappeared, and branches are no longer showing, when I reached about 300 local branches in Sourcetree. It reappeared when I deleted the newly added branch that caused the issue. Note that about 1500 remote branches show fine. I suspect that Sourcetree has a hardcoded limit for the number of branches, that may need to be raised substantially or preferably removed.

I found this question demonstrating a similar issue with a subfolder:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Sourcetree-questions/Entire-folder-of-local-branches-missing-from-left-hand-pane-in/qaq-p/1029070

And posted this comment for a similar issue on Stack Overflow:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48121348/sourcetree-some-local-branches-disappeared#comment138589451_59886103

I'm on Sourcetree 4.2.8 (265) on macOS 13.5 Ventura with system git 2.39.3.

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Edit: a workaround is to click the lower left filter box in the sidebar and type something like "-", "_" or " " that appears in the name of relevant branch(es), then View->Filter in Sidebar to reduce the number of branches shown to less than 300.

Otherwise you'll have to painstakingly delete local branches to get below 300, which is such a pain that I'll leave some commands to help with that:

# delete merged and pushed branch
#
# list merged and pushed branches, oldest first, <trunk> optional
git branch --sort=committerdate --merged <trunk> | cat
# list unmerged branches, oldest first, <trunk> optional
git branch --sort=committerdate --no-merged <trunk> | cat
# get last commit on branch
git log '<branch_name>'^..'<branch_name>'
# find branch containing commit
git branch --contains <commit>
# find branch root
git rev-list $(git rev-list --first-parent ^'<branch>' '<trunk>' | tail -n1)^^!
# find branch merge commit
git rev-list '<branch>'..'<trunk>' --ancestry-path --merges | tail -1
# get merge commit parent on trunk
git show <merge_commit>^1
# get merge commit parent on branch
git show <merge_commit>^2
#
# delete branch only if it's merged
git branch -d '<branch>'
# undelete branch, might have seen "Deleted branch <branch> (was <last_commit_on_branch_before_merge>)"
git checkout -b '<branch>' <last_commit_on_branch_before_merge>

Note that if you deleted a branch and wish to undelete it, you can find the branch in a remote repository like Bitbucket, GitHub or GitLab. Then find the last commit on the branch before its merge commit and use the undelete branch command above to recreate it locally.