Quick Actions

In this episode, I’ll introduce you to our “Quick Actions” dialog. You will love it - especially in bigger repositories with lots of branches and tags.

Quick Actions allows you to navigate and perform actions on many items without having to dig through your repository.

To access Quick Actions, simply click the toolbar button - or hit CMD+Shift+A.

Let’s have a look what exactly you can do with Quick Actions.

To begin with, you can use it to navigate and access certain views in Tower, using only the keyboard. If you want to go to Pull Requests, for example, you can quickly do it from here.

But there’s more. Let’s say you have the need to check out a certain branch but you have hundreds of branches grouped into folders. There is no need to dig around the folders - all you need to do is to enter part of the branch’s name in the Quick Actions dialog and it will show you the matching branches.

Once you’ve found the branch you are looking for, you can hit Arrow-Right key to access many actions you can perform on that item. This way, you can check out the branch, publish it, push, pull, perform a merge or rebase, and so on.

You can also use Quick Actions to find files in your repository. For example, if you are looking for “index.html”, you can simply start typing the file name to locate it. Again, using the Arrow-Right key you can access the actions you can perform on the file. Showing the file’s history, opening it in an editor or in Finder, and copying the file path is just a couple of keystrokes away.

Another common thing to do with Quick Actions is to search for a certain commit. Just copy the commit hash, paste it and get easy access to actions like creating a branch or tag off that commit, edit the commit itself or the commit message or opening the diff tool to show the changes in the commit.

Don’t hesitate to play around and see for yourself how Quick Actions can help you in your daily workflows!