The tree buffer makes it easy to drill down through the directories of your git repository, but it’s not obvious how you could go up a level to the parent directory. This new mappings ".." helps.
We are purposefully including an older version of snipMate (0.84) from mikefarmer's repo so that it works with the long list of snippets available from the scrooloose/snippets collection. The current mainline snipMate seems to be no longer compatible with those snippets, but the scrooloose collection is still the best one to use.