Tower 2.0

Tower 2 is now available. I like some of the new features, such as support for multiple windows, the new Open Quickly feature, changing the tabs to a sidebar, sending folder diffs to BBEdit or Kaleidoscope, and the removal of the popovers.

Previous versions would hang forever when there were a large number of changes in the working copy. I think this is fixed—at least I never saw that happen during beta testing.

There are some problems, though:

• The sheet for committing has been replaced by a pane that expands and contracts in animated fashion, which is distracting. It is not as easily keyboard-navigable.
• The working copy window has been redesigned so that the panes are left-to-right rather than top-to-bottom. I liked the old way much better. Now, the commit message, history list, file paths, and diffs are all too narrow—especially on an internal display but even on my 30-inch external one.
• When arrow-keying through a list of changed files, the viewer sometimes shows the changes for a previously selected file, rather than the current one.
• The commit viewer used to show the diffs right away. Now they’re hidden until you click a button. There is no menu command or keyboard shortcut.
• More generally, most of the important keyboard shortcuts have changed. The new ones are OK, but I don’t think they’re clearly better.
• Discard Local Changes, one of my most frequently used commands, is no longer in the menu bar. It’s only available via a contextual menu. The documentation claims that there is a Command-Control-Delete keyboard shortcut, but that actually deletes the file.
• The file history view is still not as good as SourceTree’s, and it has actually gotten worse. Before, there was a list of commits in a too-small popover. Now, the file history view is essentially just a search for the commits that touched the file. Clicking on a commit shows a list of all the files that were changed in that commit. There is no easy way to see just the changes for a particular file or to quickly compare multiple versions.
• It’s still hard to access the history for a file if you’re starting from your text editor or the Finder. Why can’t you drag and drop a file onto the Dock icon? Or onto the search box? Or pass it to the gittower command?
• It still can’t search the contents of commits.

Developer Tool Git Git Tower Mac Mac App Version Control

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