I fully agree with Kevin. I find it very strange that the Sourcetree team doesn't want to fix this problem. It is a very simple and easy fix, so they must really want to keep the wasteful file list. If you won't even consider fixing this, why not close this jira?

The image used in the blog post for 1.9.5 (link below) is an example of the style of listing that I think should be used for all file listings, such as the working copy view. It has the alternating highlight on the rows, eliminates the lines between each row, and allows more rows to be presented in a given amount of vertical space than can be done today. Other than the addition of checkboxes, using this style would give back the more efficient/compact listing that we had in 1.8.

Image link: http://blog.sourcetreeapp.com/files/2014/07/gitpushmatching.png-1024x429.jpeg

Please go back to 1.8.1. There are too many problems with 1.9.x (including 1.9.3), so you would be much better of restarting with 1.8.1. And please then consider not fixing what is not broken.

Regarding this specific issue, I very much agree with previous statements. The new spacing is very bad.

The ONLY good change in 1.9 is making the Working Copy and Commit window exactly the same, since they were so similar anyway.

Nothing else was good!

I want to say frankly that the entire redesign should be reconsidered. So much of what I see is less usable and attractive to me than the earlier design. Please consider a rollback..

I'd have to agree with this sentiment - I found almost every UX change in 1.9 jarring, and I'm generally pretty relaxed about SourceTree upgrades tweaking the UI. I've rolled back my SourceTree to 1.8 until this gets sorted out.

Specifically on this issue, the extra white space around file rows and the lines bloat the pending file list a lot - on a Retina 1440 display, I get half as many files in view without scrolling as in 1.8.

Just today I accidentally brought up 1.9 instead of the 1.8 I was able to find on my Time Machine drive, which I've been using for now. I want to say frankly that the entire redesign should be reconsidered. So much of what I see is less usable and attractive to me than the earlier design. Please consider a rollback.

(I'll try to file tickets for everything as I have time, but: the button at the top saying which files and how they're sorted (Pending files, sorted by status). the dozens of "ellipses" buttons that you're supposed to click on to get essentially a different set of context menu contents than the other context menu you get by control-clicking on the same object; the other ellipsis button that replaces "Discard file" and makes it different from the "Discard hunk" buttons; the line-numbers gutter right in the middle of the UI; the vast array of checkmarks that check and uncheck themselves at various turns)

Totally agree on this, it's the first thing I noticed in 1.9 - they are distracting, take up more screen real estate and are inconsistent with the main pane.
The alternating line background colour is less intrusive and makes it much easier to scan down a list of files.