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by imfletcher 4343 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.

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.

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.

On a related note, here are the keyboard shortcuts for Tower: http://git-tower.com/help/mac/faq-and-tips/keyboard-shortcut...