GitHub pushed out v2.0 of its Desktop app this week, delivering a brace of headline features which it says have been heavily requested by users.

First up is stashing, which is a way to address those situations where, according to the announcement post by senior product manager Billy Griffin “you’re in the middle of reproducing and fixing a bug, and you need to switch context temporarily.” If that’s the case, you can now save those changes, without actually committing them.

The other headline features is “rebasing”, which allows users to integrate changes from one branch to another, while producing a clean commit history. As our friends at The Register point out, both these features can be a risky option for careless developers, or the newer converts to Git which the app is aimed at.

Other new features include the ability to group repositories by owner and list recent repositories at the top, and the addition of a “discard all changes” action under the Branch menu.

The update also includes a raft of fixes and improvements, listed here, right down to adding a Lowercase pronoun in “Revert this commit” menu item.

Griffin’s blog also makes the point that “collaboration should be fun” and not “tedious”, indicating that this has been the aim with most of the updates since v1.0. These include the use of emojis on commit messages, easier selection of co-authors, and suggested next steps, when committing. The new version gets some new suggestions, including a suggestion to create a pull request after publishing a branch

To be fair, this has been an obsession with GitHub full stop, at least since its acquisition by Microsoft, with the addition of status options and extended starring – something that has irked some users who have expressed fears that GitHub could become some kind of social network.