# git-cola v1.8.0

## Usability, bells and whistles

- git cola learned to honor .gitattributes when showing and interactively applying diffs. This makes it possible to store files in git using a non-utf-8 encoding and git cola will properly accept them. This must be enabled by settings cola.fileattributes to true, as it incurs a small performance penalty.

  https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/96

- git cola now wraps commit messages at 72 columns automatically. This is configurable using the cola.linebreak variable to enable/disable the feature, and cola.textwidth to configure the limit.

  https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/133

- A new “Open Recent” sub-menu was added to the “File” menu. This makes it easy to open a recently-edited repository.

  https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola/issues/135

- We now show a preview for untracked files when they are clicked using the Status tool.

- A new “Open Using Default Application” action was added to the Status tool. It is activated using either Spacebar or through the context menu. This action uses xdg-open on Linux and open on Mac OS X.

- A new “Open Parent Directory” action was added to the Status tool. It is activated using either Shift+Spacebar or through the context menu.

- git dag learned to honor the log.date git configuration variable. This makes the date display follow whatever format the user has configured.

- A new git cola config sub-command was added for quickly tweaking git cola‘s git configuration settings.

- Some small usability tweaks – some user confirmation prompts were defaulting to “Cancel” when they should have been defaulting to the affirmative option instead.

## Fixes

- Properly handle arbitrarily-named branches.
- We went back to launching git mergetool using an xterm. The reason is that there are a couple of places where git mergetool requires a terminal for user interaction not covered by –no-prompt.
- We now properly handle an edge case when applying short diffs at the start of a file.