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Join our Beta Channel to preview the latest Tower improvements for Mac and Windows.
You'll automatically receive new builds before they become available to the general public.
Stacked Branches
Coming in 12.0
Tower 12 marks the beginning of our ambitious "Tower Workflows" project by introducing "Branch Dependency" functionalities and the new "Restack" feature.
By incorporating Branch Dependencies, Tower can now easily track all the parent branches of a branch and provide the ability to "restack" the branch, along with all its parent branches, back to the "trunk" branch.
There's also a new Welcome Screen so that you can start working on your projects as soon as you launch Tower.
Check out this blog post for more information about this release.
Release Notes
Fixed
Services: Previously, GitLab repositories were incorrectly displayed in some groups, but this issue has now been resolved.
Sidebar: Opening the submodule context menu could cause the application to crash, but this issue has been fixed.
A potential crash that occurred when displaying a toast notification has also been fixed.
Improved
Stacked Branches: Renamed the default workflow from "Stacked PR Branches" to "Stacked Branches".
Stacked Branches: Improved the wording on the restack dialog for Stacked Branches.
Stacked Branches: Added the option "Stack Branches under parent branch" to the Stacked Branches Workflow dialog.
Stacked Branches: Now a suggested base branch is selected by default when enabling the Stacked Branches Workflow.
Sidebar: Replaced the "Needs restack" icon in the sidebar.
Sidebar: Removed the "Missing parent" state for branches without a parent being set.
Compare branches: Improved the readability of the branch selector in the Compare branches feature to accommodate longer branch names.
Compare branches: If a parent branch is defined it will be set as a default branch to compare against.
Updated the provided Portable Git to version 2.45.2.
Fixed
Commit View: The issue where commit history would disappear from the list while scrolling in certain scenarios has been fixed.
Stacked Branches: Branch dependencies are now correctly recreated after the Restack action.
Sidebar: Double-clicking to check out the parent branch now works as expected.
Fixed a crash that occurred when opening a repository that does not contain any branches.
When adding a repository via "File -> Open," the repository will now be added to bookmarks and opened.
New
Branch Dependencies: We added the ability to create branch dependencies in Tower, which will serve as a foundation for many new features and improvements in the future. It allows Tower to keep track of the original branch from which another branch was created, a capability not natively supported by Git. Newly created branches in Tower automatically inherit their starting branch, and users can manually set or change the parent branch via the context menu.
Stacked Branches: As the first feature to leverage our new Branch Dependencies, Tower enables you to create "stacks" of branches—branches that depend on other branches—and effortlessly restack them with a single action. This greatly simplifies workflows that rely on stacked branches, eliminating the cumbersome and error-prone process of manually restacking multiple branches. You can activate this feature through the "Workflows" toolbar button.
Fixed
Detecting unsafe directories accessed via mapped network drives and adding them to “safe.directories” in gitconfig now works as expected.
Improved
Branch Dependencies: We added the ability to select the parent branch when creating new branches.
Branch Dependencies: The performance of the "Set Parent Branch" context menu has been improved.
Stacked Branches: The restack action dialog now contains information about the number of branches in the stack as well as the base branch name.
Fixed
Stacked Branches: Branches were not updated correctly on restack if they introduced no new commits relative to their parents. This has been fixed.
Repository Sidebar: The delete branch keyboard shortcut did not do anything. This has been fixed.
Repository Sidebar: The stash count is now updating as expected.
Services: Bitbucket pull requests are now displaying the correct number and can be shown via the branch context menu in the repository sidebar.
Remotes: Trying to add a remote with an IPv6 address led to a crash. This has been fixed by not validating the URL. We are looking at adding proper IPv6 support.
Fixed
After the new Quicklaunch window had been presented, pressing "Enter" anywhere in the application would unexpectedly close and re-open the repository window.
New
Branch Dependencies: We added the ability to create branch dependencies in Tower, which will serve as a foundation for many new features and improvements in the future. It allows Tower to keep track of the original branch from which another branch was created, a capability not natively supported by Git. Newly created branches in Tower automatically inherit their starting branch, and users can manually set or change the parent branch via the context menu.
Stacked Branches: As the first feature to leverage our new Branch Dependencies, Tower enables you to create "stacks" of branches—branches that depend on other branches—and effortlessly restack them with a single action. This greatly simplifies workflows that rely on stacked branches, eliminating the cumbersome and error-prone process of manually restacking multiple branches. You can activate this feature through the "Workflows" toolbar button.
Launch Window: If Tower is launched or activated and there are no windows currently open, Tower will now show a special launch window to let you quickly open a repository.
Improved
App Icon: The selected app icon will now persist in the Dock, even when Tower is not running.
Commit Details: If author and committer of a commit are identical even though the timestamps differ, do not show the avatar image twice.
Also updated the bundled Git version to 2.45.1.
How to Get Access
Head over to "Preferences > Updates" to join our Beta Channel.
