
Tower 2 - alexbilbie
http://www.git-tower.com/blog/tower2-is-here
======
andrewingram
Great customer service too. When Tower was first released at the end of 2010,
I asked for a feature (multiple windows) but they said it wasn't part of their
plan for the UI. Anyway, this morning I got an email from them to specifically
tell me that the feature I asked for was in version 2. They'd bothered to go
back through 3 and a half years of support tickets to find customers who would
benefit from the new release, I was hugely impressed.

~~~
nolok
I'm assuming you're not involved in the tracking of tasks and releases in your
job ? Because linking support ticket / customer to a task, and a set of tasks
to a release, is a very common and regular feature of task tracking.

I'm not saying it's not awesome that they contacted you and others like that,
it's the rare kind of great marketing that benefits both sides, but I
certainly do hope that a company working in their field would know to use
proper dev tools and not "go back though 3 and a half years of support tickets
to find customers".

(I have no idea why there aren't more companies doing it)

~~~
jib
Because it is hard and costly to have a system that does that effectively, and
harder and more costly to actually maintain integrity in that system over
time.

It IS impressive to be doing this, at least once you're past the stage of
having a few guys doing customer support.

Building an integration between a CRM and a backlog/bug tracker has some
complexity. Maintaining that over several years and proactively contacting
requesters back is impressive. At least in my world. :)

~~~
eropple
_> Because it is hard and costly to have a system that does that effectively,
and harder and more costly to actually maintain integrity in that system over
time._

I don't think this is really true. I implemented it with Redmine for ~12
customer support people in a day or so. Been ticking along for five years
without a complaint.

~~~
NegativeK
I'm more impressed with the social aspect than the software.

Trackers exist and are great, but people tend to ignore bugs/requests and
either let them rot without cleanup or do sweeps that kill old information.

------
imfletcher
I use Tower daily, and used the Tower 2 beta for a bit. I have to say I think
they are missing an opportunity. There are a few cool new features (like
autofetch) but for the most part, the upgrade smacks of change-for-change-
sakes not actual progress towards a good workflow. More clicks are required,
keyboard-only navigation is tough, diffs are hidden by default.

One thing most of these guys do is simply smack a UI on top of a command line,
rather than explore ways to manipulate the available data into a better
workflow than you could possibly get via commands. the conflict wizard is a
good step, but that is only part of the story. Repo's are full of data ready
to be mined in ways that aren't just 'git pull' and 'git merge'. There is a
visual file history, changes made per-person, etc.

~~~
zak_mc_kracken
This is one of the things I really like about SourceTree, that I can do pretty
much everything from the keyboard. Several times a day, I type

\- Ctrl-shift-+ (add file to index)

\- Ctrl-shift-c (commit)

\- (type the description of the commit)

\- Alt-enter (validate)

\- Ctrl-shift-p (push)

No mouse necessary.

The SourceTree people know how a developer works.

~~~
dive
To be fair, you can do this in Tower (1) with the same steps:

\- Cmd + Alt + A (to index)

\- Cmd + Alt + C (add commit message or amend)

\- Alt + Enter (validate)

\- Cmd + Alt + Shift + P (push)

But, as I said before in comments, base UX abilities now broken in Tower 2.

~~~
e_proxus
They've missed keyboard navigation completely. To be fair, there are shortcuts
for many things, but it is still practically impossible to navigate the UI
with the keyboard only.

For example, ⌘1 takes you to the working copy, but it only selects the
"Working Copy" menu item to the left, it doesn't focus the working copy pane.
The first thing I tried was to navigate the unstaged files with the arrow
keys, but that just moved me back to the History view since that list was
somehow focused in the background. To focus the file list, I had to press tab
about 20 times to pass all the controls in the tab order on the way there.

------
solutionyogi
That video was extremely well done.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyyuqf1m-2E](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyyuqf1m-2E)

For a moment, it made me want to ditch Windows and migrate to Mac just to use
this client.

Personal favorite, being able to see up stream commits without actually
applying them on your local branch.

I currently use SmartGIT on Windows and I am sort-of-happy with it. I wonder
why no one is trying to create a killer Git client on Windows.

~~~
_stephan
_I wonder why no one is trying to create a killer Git client on Windows._

Because there is already one: SourceTree (which is also available for OS X).

~~~
solutionyogi
I am aware of SourceTree. However, I personally don't find it a killer client.
I prefer SmartGit over SourceTree. Don't get me wrong, the app is functional
but it doesn't have the features I want in a client. E.g. one of the most
important feature for me is the Folder View for my repository where I can
quickly look up any file and see history for it.

~~~
to3m
You get this (or something like it) in the OS X version of SourceTree: a tree
view of your working copy, plus the Reveal Log... context menu option. So if
you were going to switch to OS X anyway, purely over the git client situation,
once you've spent £1,500 on your shiny new Mac you will at least not have to
spend any more on the git client.

(I don't know why the Windows incarnation lacks a tree view. A Win32 treeview
would be perfectly functional, and they're easy to code for. (Never having
seen the SourceTree code, I can of course confidently say that this would
apply here.) But if you don't mind a flat list, Reveal Log... is present and
correct. So you'd be good to go already.)

------
hellopat
I bought Tower before I found out about Sourcetree, and while I enjoyed using
it, I found that Soucetree was way more feature rich. Can anyone give me a
reason why I should fork over even more dough for an app that I'm not even
sure I'd end up using?

~~~
thathonkey
FWIW when I was researching Git GUIs for some CLI-averse team members, I came
to the same conclusion. Sourcetree is the best and most feature-complete GUI
out there for Git (Tower was one of the others I looked at).

Plus it is free.

------
jawngee
I've been messing around with this for about 20 minutes. I was a huge Tower 1
fan until I found SourceTree, which, back then, handled submodules way better.

I hate when people post things to HN and then the dour crowd posts a bunch of
negative crap about it, but I honestly haven't found anything in my scant 20
minutes with it that is giving me the urge to want to fork the $30 to upgrade.
I don't really need to drag and drop stuff to branch and push. I understand
english pretty well, so I get what "Resolve using mine" means. Otherwise, they
kind of look pretty similar to each other, except that it's a bit easier to
see what's going on with SourceTree.

I don't know, I raved about Tower before I gave SourceTree a good go.
SourceTree's UI has made giant leaps since then and I don't see anything in
Tower that's easier to do than SourceTree. Also, the UI feels a little too
"large" to me somehow, it's not comfortable at all.

------
dewey
In case you are wondering: Yes there's way to upgrade your 1.x licence (€25 +
tax), just navigate through the buy process and it'll give you an option to
select that. I was searching for that on the landing page but couldn't find
anything.

------
nailer
Can I squash commits and interactive rebase generally? These are pretty
important to having a clean commit history, ie:

    
    
      'Add foo'
    

rather than:

    
    
      'Add foo' 
      'Small tweak to foo'
      'Fix forgetting to enable foo'

~~~
tobidobi
Interactive rebase is not yet supported. But is already on the roadmap and
will come in 2.x.

------
nimmen
Errors on purchase page are not encouraging:

Notice: Undefined index: body style="background-color: white; color: black;
font-size: 10pt; font-family: 'lucida grande', verdana, arial, helvetica,
sans-serif;"> in
/kunden/281288_70176/apps/website_tower/releases/9b6ba7f1-20142207090452/www/lib/pricing.php
on line 192

~~~
goatforce5
Agreed. I've used Tower since one of the earliest releases and was ready to
pull out my credit card before even reading what the new features were.

Meh.

------
fideloper
Visual conflict management and visual "git add -p" does look really nice.

(Here's a good SO q/a on `git add -p`:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1085162/commit-only-
part-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1085162/commit-only-part-of-a-
file-in-git))

------
dive
I'm disappointed. Now we have nice UI plus huge UX downgrade:

\- unchangeable font in sidebar;

\- quick navigation via Cmd + [1,2,3] doesn't resign focus to the file/change
list, so you need to click to continue use your hot keys (I hate app that make
me clicking unnecessarily!);

\- all main keyboard hotkeys changed (Cmd + Alt + [Shift] + P - for pushing
[pulling] and etc). But why do you ask? Because they said;

\- 'Cmd + Ctrl + Backspace' doesn't discard local changes for the selected
files, marks them as deleted instead (nice try);

\- submodules autofetching enabled by default and said 'Nice to meet you!' to
our project with git-subtree based modules.

As a result, I can not use this app, because my hands still remember and I
hate when I'm forced to click without the need!

A good chance for SourceTree.

------
donatj
It looks like custom diff tools are currently broken. I've got a plist/shell
script for Beyond Compare 4 that worked fine in Tower 1.x but clicking diff
tool doesn't seem to do anything in 2.x. Hopefully they'll fix this soon.

------
Mithaldu
A third-party git GUI that defaults to exposing the staging area by default
and provides nicely granular tool for commit composition? I am impressed.

Only sad thing is i can't usefully try it out, being on Windows.

------
bellerocky
It's a nice update, but I wish I could use the search bar to search for files
in the tree. This would be really useful when I have an issue in a file and
wanted to do a blame for that file. Having to go navigate through the UI file
tree to do this is very painful, and it's very simple on the command line. It
would be even nicer if find file feature in the seach bar this was a fuzzy
finder, it could use the silver searcher to do this even.

------
isnotchicago
A nice feature of the previous version of Tower (and even more previously,
most SVN clients), is the ability to browse the entire repo and instantly see
info about the last commit of each file (e.g., date, author).

That seems to be missing in this version. There is a Tree view of the repo for
each commit, but it is cumbersome to both browse files AND see when files were
(last) changed. Has anyone seen such a feature in Tower 2 or other GUIs?

------
king_magic
It's annoying that it takes a bit of digging to find out the actual price.

(Yes, I realize it's only several clicks, but frankly I feel a lot better
about handing over my money to a company that clearly displays their pricing)

------
tkschmidt
Is there an option to automatically merge --non-ff a feature branch into
development? "Finish feature" seems to use just merge

~~~
tobidobi
In the standard "Merge" dialog (see toolbar button), the option "Always
generate merge commit" will make sure the merge is --no-ff.

~~~
tkschmidt
but this option doesn't work for the "finish feature" part of git-flow

------
eru
Would there be any use for this tool if you already know your way around the
git command line?

~~~
tobidobi
Being able to do basic things on the command line is definitely nice. And the
question is not command line VERSUS a GUI. Tower, e.g. can be used side-by-
side with the command line.

However, Tower help you both become more productive and make fewer mistakes.
No one likes to inspect a complex project history on the command line. Getting
a visual representation of a conflict helps you resolve it more confidently.
Automatically having local changes stashed away prevents problems... There are
indeed many scenarios where a GUI is plain helpful - for beginners and pros
alike.

~~~
nawitus
>Getting a visual representation of a conflict helps you resolve it more
confidently.

You can launch e.g. kdiff3 when necessary to resolve conflicts visually
without using a GUI git clint.

------
amykhar
How does it compare to SourceTree, which is free?

~~~
tobidobi
First, let me say that Sourcetree is an excellent application, too. However,
most people that chose Tower over Sourcetree prefer our approach in regard to
user interface, workflows, usability, etc. A visual conflict wizard, a new
service account manager, automatic stashing... Tower goes a long way to make
using Git both as easy and as comfortable as possible.

------
vladikoff
Try SourceTree, save yourself $59.00.

------
Vanayad
Here I thought it was addictive game like 2048 ...

------
lnanek2
Must be tough selling something GitHub gives away for free...

~~~
solutionyogi
I don't think so. I use Windows and I paid 79$ for SmartGit.

[http://www.syntevo.com/smartgithg/purchase](http://www.syntevo.com/smartgithg/purchase)

Git is great but when I am using it 50 times a day, I want to use a UI which
lets me focus on my work and as they say, let me avoid the sharp edges. I
would be more than happy to pay 59$ for Tower 2. Alas, it's not available on
Windows.

~~~
slantyyz
I'm in a similar boat in that I just switched back to Windows from Mac last
week. The Mac Git UI client that helped me avoid the sharp edges was Gitbox
([http://www.gitboxapp.com/](http://www.gitboxapp.com/)) which is only $15.
Tower looks like a pretty nice client though.

I'm currently using SourceTree (I find it a little better than Github's
Windows app), but I feel like I'm constantly clicking on way too many buttons
in the UI in comparison to Gitbox. Muscle memory, I guess.

