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Tower or GitBox? One man’s opinion

9 months ago

I’ve spent 30 days evaluating Tower and GitBox, each of which claims to make working with git nicer. I don’t mind working with the command line interface, but I’m open to explore any tool that could improve my workflow. As usual, I only present my opinion, and if that helps you, that makes me happy.

I like about both:

  • Easy to set up repositories or working copies. Takes seconds.
  • Clear, easy-to-understand user interface.

I like about Tower:

  • Beautiful user interface; very pleasant to use.

I like about GitBox:

  • I didn’t understand the UI contols for Push/Pull until I stared at them for a few minutes.
  • Better hot keys than Tower.

I don’t mind about GitBox:

  • Minimal user interface. A little stark, but easy to use.

What I recommend to the makers of Tower.app:

  • Show me the commands you issue on my behalf. For extra credit, show them to me with timestamps.
  • Add hot keys for push/pull.

What I recommend to the makers of GitBox:

  • Show me the timestamp of the commands and, by default, sort on timestamp. I’d like to see the sequence of commands you’ve issued on my behalf.
  • Support amending commits! That’s missing. For bonus marks, stop me from trying to amend a commit I’ve already pushed.
  • Please improve GitBox’s reliability: I noticed a lot of crashes when I tried to push to github, but not enough to discern a pattern.

What I recommend to both:

  • Show me a useful progress bar while pushing. I push up to hundreds of MB of data at a time. I need to be able to tell the difference between “slow” and “failed”. The tools appeared to be stuck when they had, in fact, finished. This happened a few times. I need to trust my version control tools much more than I trust other tools.

Between the two, GitBox appears to be a better value, but I’m going to try some other clients to see what they have to offer.

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