Tower 14 for Windows — Branches Review & Smarter "Fully Merged" Detection

In Tower 13 for Windows, we gave you Branch Pinning and Automatic Branch Management to help you keep your sidebar under control. The feedback was clear: you liked it, and you wanted to go further.

So that's exactly what we did. Tower 14 for Windows helps you answer two questions that come up constantly when tidying up a repository:

• "What's actually going on with all of these branches?" — answered by the new Branches Review view.
• "Is it really safe to delete this one?" — answered by our smarter "Fully Merged" detection.

Both features made their debut on the Mac, and we're thrilled to bring them to Windows. Let's dive into what's new!

Branches Review

If your repository has dozens of branches, you'll appreciate the new "Branches Review" view, accessible in the "Workspace" section in the sidebar.

Instead of scrolling through your sidebar and inspecting branches one by one, Branches Review puts them all side by side and compares them against a base branch of your choosing (in the example above, develop). At a glance, you can tell which branches are moving forward, which ones have gone quiet, and which ones have already made their way into the base branch.

You can sort the list by name or by the date each branch was last updated, and narrow it down with a set of handy filters:

• Active or Stale — spot the branches nobody has touched in a while.
• Fully Merged, Mergeable, or with Merge Conflicts — see what's already done and what will fight back when you integrate it.
• With or without Pull Requests — find the work that never made it to review.
• With Tracking Errors — catch branches whose remote counterpart no longer exists.

Combine a couple of these and you have an instant cleanup list: "stale branches that are fully merged and have no open Pull Request" is usually a very safe place to start 😉

Smarter "Fully Merged" Detection

Have you ever deleted a branch with sweaty palms because you weren't completely sure it had been merged?

This happens because of the nature of squash and rebase merges. When a Pull Request is merged this way, the commits that land on the base branch differ from the ones 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 — and your repository slowly fills up with "just in case" branches.

Tower 14 for Windows puts an end to that.

Merged Pull Request Detection

With Tower Pro, 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 "Merged" badge.

4 Independent Checks

Merged Pull Requests are just one source of truth. Tower now runs a series of independent checks to determine whether 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 — a Tower Pro feature.
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 Hint View

Trust is everything when deleting branches — so the "Fully Merged" hint view now shows 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.

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

Of course, this all plays beautifully with the Automatic Branch Management features introduced in Tower 13: fully merged branches can be archived in just a couple of clicks, keeping your sidebar clean and your mind at ease.

View Customization

Finally, a smaller change that you'll probably use every single day.

The gear menu in the sidebar footer collects the settings that control what the sidebar actually shows you: the reflog, the number of stashes, grouped refs, the "Fully Merged" badge, stale branch info, and where stacked branches are listed.

Remote branches and tags get their own filter settings, too. If you work in a repository with hundreds of refs, sorting them by name and limiting the list to the newest 10, 25, 100, or 500 entries makes the sidebar much easier to scan.

And it doesn't stop at the sidebar. While you inspect a file diff, the footer on the right now keeps three controls within reach:

1. Context: sets how many unchanged lines Tower shows around each change — anywhere from a single line up to 50.
2. Whitespace Changes: toggles whether whitespace-only changes show up in the diff.
3. Complete File: displays the entire file instead of only the changed chunks.

Of the three, the context setting is also available from the menu bar, under "View" → "Diff Context Lines".

Improvements and Bug Fixes

Before we wrap up: you might have noticed that Tower is sporting a fresh new app icon! 😎

As is tradition, we also took some time to implement improvements across the board:

• Title Bar: License and update notices now live in the window title bar, keeping the toolbar focused on repository actions.
• Sidebar: The "Branches" group context menu now more closely matches Tower for Mac, including direct branch-creation actions.
• Services: Service account refreshes are noticeably more responsive.
• Bundled Git: Git for Windows was updated to version 2.55.0.5.

We also fixed some bugs! Here is what we addressed:

• Trial Registration: Fixed the issues that prevented new users from registering their free trial.
• Bitbucket: Fixed OAuth account refreshes, cloning, fetching, and pushing failing when newer Bitbucket tokens exceeded the Windows Credential Manager size limit.
• Services: Fixed crashes while refreshing service repository lists, and when Azure DevOps returns incomplete Pull Request data.
• Diff View: Fixed newly staged files sometimes opening with their first lines cut off.
• Graphite: Graphite branches with a parent now offer the "Unset Parent Branch" quick action.

We hope you enjoy Tower 14 for Windows! 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!