3 min episode 11 of 18
For this episode, we will give the mouse a break. Instead, we will look at some actions we can achive in Tower by using just keyboard shortcuts.
There are lots of keyboard shortcuts available for you to use in Tower. In this video, we’re only going to look at 3 concrete workflows that allow you to perform actions quickly and without touching the mouse. Once you get used to such a workflow, you won’t have to take your fingers off the keyboard which can be quite a time saver in the long run.
Let’s start with Quick Amend. As you may already know, the Amend feature is used to modify the most recent commit. It is very useful in those cases when we forget to add a change to a commit.
I have prepared some changes that I would like to use to amend my last commit.
The usual way to do this would be to stage the changes, tick the “Amend” checkbox and then commit.
Quick Amend offers an even easier way. With the changes staged, simply hold down the Alt key. The Commit button has now changed to Amend. Let’s click the button to go ahead. We can see that the new changes have now been added to the last commit.
Another practical case of using keyboard shortcuts is the committing process itself. We are in the Working Copy view and have selected a changed file. We can then use the arrow keys to move up and down through the list of changes. Use the spacebar to stage and unstage changes.
Using Cmd+Shift+C will jump to the commit subject field. You can now enter a title and use Cmd+Return to finish the commit.
Finally, let’s look at how to check out a branch without the mouse. This is especially useful when you have dozens or even hundreds of branches. In the episode about Quick Actions, we have already seen that using Cmd+Shift+A will open up the Quick Actions dialog.
We can then start typing a branch name and select the branch we need from the results. Then, press tab to see the actions available and select Check Out branch. That’s it, we’ve just checked out the “feature/login” branch.
We’ve just seen 3 example workflows but there is a lot more to play around with.