Search

In this episode, we will take a closer look at the Search funcionality in Tower.

First, let’s start with searching the commit history. To do that, we will click on the magnifying glass icon to activate the search field. You can see that there are several categories to search for. Depending on the selected category, Tower will use live search and auto-complete the information you enter.

For example, let’s select the File caterory and start typing “index”. Tower then offers a list of suggestions to choose from.

Selecting one of the results will filter the commit history to show only those commits that contain the selected file. There is no need to take our hands off the keyboard to view the commits: pressing tab in this view will bring the focus to the list of commits. Then we can use the arrow keys to navigate the list.

We can also combine the search criteria to further narrow down our search. To do that, we can click on the plus sign above the list of commits. Let’s add a new criteria to search for a specific author. Then, why not filter further and look for a specific word in commit messages.

Also, searching is not limited to the commit history. Let’s switch to the Working Copy to search in our file tree. You might notice that the search categories have now changed and we are now able to search only files. Let’s search for the word “release” - voilà, we now have a list of files containing this word.

As you can see, the Search functionality in Tower offers you a lot of flexibility to dive deep in a repository and find the data you need.