Version management with Tower 9: Detect and fix merge conflicts faster

The German company SaaS.group has presented version 9 of its Git desktop client Tower for macOS. A new merge UI is intended to help developers, among other things, to identify and resolve merge conflicts more quickly. The release also includes a number of functions that have long been on the wish list of tower users – including the ability to create snapshots.

Manage merge conflicts more easily

For the new release, the Tower development team had set itself the goal of making the merging of code sequences and their revision not only more uniform, but also more understandable. For this purpose, the Merge UI has been completely revised compared to Tower 8. Message banners with a yellow background now inform developers unmistakably about any merge conflicts that occur. At a glance, the number of all conflicts – both those that are still open and those that have already been resolved (resolved) – between two branches can be seen. However, you can use filter settings to hide the merge conflicts that have been resolved, for example.

The Merge UI also comes up with new functions under the redesigned interface. If developers initiate a merger of branches or revisions via merge, rebase or pull, a dialog window immediately warns of potential conflicts. Files that have not yet been merged can now be easily restored if errors occur during a merge.

According to the announcement in the blog, snapshots are apparently one of the long-awaited functions of tower users. In order to save the current status of their work, developers can create snapshots of their entire working copy as well as of individual modified files, which can then be viewed again at any time in the stashes view of the Git client. In this way, different ideas can be tried out without having to risk losing the current status.

Long-awaited wishes fulfilled

The Tower team has fulfilled another wish with the option of automatically extending diffs in changesets. In order to avoid any performance problems when loading very large diffs, a threshold value can now be set for the size above which the Git client will first ask before trying to open the diff. The default value for the threshold is 20 KB.

More new features and bug fixes in Tower 9 for macOS can be found on the Tower blog. Version 3 of the separately developed Windows variant has been available since the end of last year and was expanded in March 2022 to include the encryption software GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). The Git client costs from 59 euros per year per user. Students, teachers, educational institutions and non-profit organizations can get a free license.

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