New Releases for Tower on macOS and Windows

With many in the tech community changing branch naming from “master” to “main”, we wanted to make sure to reflect this change in Tower as soon as possible. On both Mac and Windows Tower now considers “main” to be a priority branch, just like “master”. However, we will go one step further: in an upcoming release we will expand on that and add the option to configure your default branch.

We prepared a short documentation on how to rename "master" to "main" in just three simple steps.

Rebase is an incredibly powerful feature in Git. If you're not familiar with it yet, make sure to check out our short video explaining Rebase and its difference to Merge. Today, we are extending Tower's rebase capabilites by introducing a lesser-known, but super useful option: rebase --onto. This feature allows you to "switch the base" for a series of commits and comes in handy if you work extensively with feature branches.

Read more about using the --onto option for Rebase in our documentation.

We are also introducing the Amend Commit option to Tower. It's a little superpower that makes it possible to edit a commit without removing the original author's name. Even though you edited the commit, it will still have the original committer as the author and you as the committer.

Our Mac team was able to optimize Tower in various areas - resulting in another performance boost. The improvements range from background operations for certain actions - such as checking out a revision or committing changes - to refactoring the initial config loading process. We also managed to improve the background execution of Git processes. As a result repository loading times are now significantly faster.

Tower's Windows version now comes with improved error handling for authentication errors with remotes. A new authentication error dialog now also allows you to edit the remote connection settings.

As always these releases include various improvements and fixes in all areas of the app, making each new Tower version better than the previous one. Please have a look at the release notes for a detailed overview.

We are currently working on a massive update for Tower's Windows version (check out our roadmap post for a sneak peek) as well as a visual overhaul of Tower's Mac version to make it feel at home on macOS Big Sur. We can't wait to show it to you!

If you already have a Tower account, make sure to update Tower to the latest version for free. And if you're not a Tower user yet, then download our 30-day free trial and take it for a spin!