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- The sheet for committing has been replaced by a pane that expands and contracts in animated fashion, which is distracting.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.
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[…] lot has improved since 2.0, but the per-file history feature is still weak, and it still can’t search commit contents or […]
[…] is better in some ways, but it no longer lets you see the full commit messages, and there’s still no way to invoke it without first navigating to the file within the app. The new commit details […]
