Tower 17 for Mac (Beta) — Smarter "Fully Merged" Detection

Have you ever deleted a branch with sweaty palms because you weren't completely sure it had been merged? This often happens due to the nature of squash and rebase merges. When a pull request is merged this way, the commits that appear on the base branch differ from those on your local branch.

As a result, Git will always insist that your branch was never merged, even though its work was integrated long ago. This usually leads to your projects becoming cluttered with numerous "just in case" branches that you are no longer certain about.

Well, good news: this problem ends today. In Tower 15, we introduced the "Fully Merged" badge and Automatic Branch Management to help you keep your repository tidy. With Tower 17, we're taking the detection behind that badge to a whole new level.

Let's dive in!

Tower's Merged Pull Request Detection

Tower now matches your local branches against merged pull requests from your hosting service, such as GitHub or GitLab.

This means Tower can reliably identify branches that were integrated via squash or rebase merges — the ones plain Git can never see.

If a Pull Request based on your branch was merged, Tower will know — and the branch will proudly receive its "Fully Merged" badge.

4 Independent Checks for Smarter Detection

Merged pull requests are just one source of truth. Tower now runs a series of independent checks to determine if a branch is fully merged:

1. Git's Merge Detection: the classic check — all of the branch's commits have been integrated into its parent branch.
2. Merged Pull Requests: Tower matches your local branches against merged PRs from your hosting service.
3. Merge Commit Analysis: Tower inspects merge commits for the branch's name and matching timestamps.
4. Deleted Remote Tracking Branches: the branch was tracking a remote branch that has since been deleted — the typical leftover after a merged Pull Request.

Together, these checks cover the full spectrum: from classic merge commits created on your local machine to squash-merged Pull Requests whose remote branches are long gone.

A More Transparent "Fully Merged" Hint View

Trust is everything when deleting branches — so we redesigned the "Fully Merged" hint view to show you exactly which checks matched.

Even better: the hint includes direct links to the merge commit or the merged pull request, so you can verify everything with a single click before hitting delete.

If you'd prefer to keep a branch around, you can simply enable "Hides Fully Merged Hint" in the branch's context menu, and Tower will keep quiet about that specific branch.

And of course, this all plays beautifully with the Automatic Branch Management features introduced in Tower 15: fully merged branches can be archived in just a couple of clicks, keeping your sidebar clean and your mind at ease.

Other Improvements

As usual, we also took some time to implement improvements across the board.

One that is particularly noteworthy is that updating submodules is now significantly faster! Tower gathers each submodule's Git data concurrently instead of one at a time—something you will especially notice in repositories with many submodules.

We also fixed a bug! Here is what we addressed:

• Services: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps accounts could send API requests to an outdated server address. This has been fixed.

We hope you enjoy this release! Happy committing! 😊

Not a Tower user yet? Download our 30-day free trial and experience a better way to work with Git!

PS: Did you know? Tower Pro is now free for students as well as teachers and educational institutions!