Thoughts on Tower

— 3 minute read

I stumbled upon Tower, a git client for macOS and Windows around 2015 when I heard Rebecca Murphey talked about it on Twitter. When I started using a Mac for work later that year, I was immediately drawn to Tower for my git needs. A lot of my friends strongly prefer the command line for anything git related. While I can do basic git operations using the CLI, I really prefer the visual representation in a GUI, particularly for the sometimes-gnarly merge conflicts that can happen when dealing with source code.

Some of the things I really like about Tower:

  • Native Mac app that looks and works great
  • Easily create branches, merge branches using drag and drop
  • Easily rebase branches from other local and remote branches
  • Quickly stash changes, view the list of available stashes and apply them on the existing branch.
  • Great handling of merge conflicts with support for several diff tools (my favorite is Kaleidoscope)
  • Undo support using CMD-Z is awesome
  • Very useful ability to search by Author, commit hash etc

It is an added bonus that they also have a Windows version. Also, the option to reset HEAD to a particular commit and keep the changes in your staging area is an awesome feature.

There is just one thing I wish Tower could do better. The textbox to enter commit description is NOT scrollable. This does not feel like a big deal, until you get to the point where you type in a long, descriptive commit message. And in times like that, it is not uncommon to have the need to navigate your text. And not being able to see a scrollbar is super frustrating. I often end up writing my commit messages in an external editor and simply copy it into Tower. This is my biggest gripe with Tower, but thankfully this is changing with better Commit Composing, coming in 2020 🤞🏽.

I realize that the subscription price could be a turn-off for several folks. Personally, I happily pay for Tower, year after year; it has saved me countless hours of work and is just a joy to use. I am grateful that I am in a position to pay for software and want to be mindful that I do not take this for granted. I wish Fournova (the company that builds Tower) thrives for decades, by running a successful business, building great software. Much like Bare Bones, the makers of BBEdit.