Tower 15 for Windows (Beta) — Your Diffs, in Full Color 🎨

Of all the requests that landed in our inbox over the years, few came up as often as this one. Reading code in plain black and white gets the job done, but it isn't exactly a joy — especially when you're going through a big change right before committing it.

Syntax highlighting made its debut on the Mac in Tower 10 for Mac, and we're thrilled to finally bring it to Windows.

Here's what's new:

• Syntax Highlighting in your diffs and in the Blame view.
• Word-Level Highlighting, so you can see exactly what changed inside a line.
• A Themes upgrade that lets you pick, build, and share your own .towertheme files.

Let's take a closer look!

Syntax Highlighting

After updating to Tower 15, head over to "Preferences" → "Text" and turn on syntax highlighting.

From then on, your diffs will display code in the colors of its language — keywords, strings, comments, and everything in between.

It may sound like a cosmetic change, but it makes a real difference: colored code is much easier to scan, and a misplaced quote or a line that was accidentally commented out will catch your eye right away.

The Blame view gets the same treatment, so you can find out who changed what (and when) without giving up that extra readability.

And yes, dark mode is supported too! 😎

Word-Level Highlighting

Knowing that a line changed is helpful. Knowing what changed in it is even better.

Until now, Tower highlighted a modified line as a whole, leaving you to compare the old and new versions character by character to spot the difference. That's easy enough on a short line, but not so much on a long function call where a single argument was renamed.

Tower 15 for Windows now highlights the changed words inside modified lines, so the actual edit jumps right out at you.

A fixed typo, a tweaked parameter, a different number — they're all impossible to miss now. Pair this with syntax highlighting, and reviewing your changes before a commit becomes a lot more pleasant.

Themes Upgrade

What good is syntax highlighting without a color scheme you love?

In "Preferences" → "Themes", you can now choose a syntax color theme for each appearance — for example, a bright one for the light appearance and a moodier one for the dark appearance.

If none of the available themes match your taste, you can create your own and edit it until it looks just right.

Themes are stored as .towertheme files that you can export and import — perfect for sharing your setup with your teammates or bringing it along to a new machine.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

As is tradition, this release also includes some improvements under the hood:

• Diff View: Tower now uses much less memory when loading diffs — a large diff needs only about a quarter of the memory it previously required. Large diffs for commits, stashes, Pull Requests, and Branches Review also show the large-diff warning right away, keeping Tower responsive.
• Bundled Git: Git for Windows was updated to version 2.56.0.4.

We also squashed quite a few bugs! Here is what we fixed:

• Stashes: Fixed Tower dropping, popping, or applying the wrong stash after several stashes were deleted at once, after undoing and redoing an action, or after the stash list changed outside of Tower. Tower now identifies each stash by its commit, so it always acts on the one you selected. Failed stash and move operations also show Tower's own error message again, instead of Git's raw output.
• Branches: Trying to delete the checked-out branch from the "Fully Merged" banner, the stale banner, or Quick Actions now shows an explanation instead of silently doing nothing. When deleting several branches, Tower now deletes the remaining ones even if one of them is checked out in another worktree, and then shows an error for that branch. Undo restores only the branches that were actually deleted.
• Git-Flow: Fixed "Finish" keeping the topic branch even when "Delete branch" was selected.
• Automatic Branch Management: Archived branches now reliably move to the "Archived" section. Auto-archiving also no longer runs on incomplete branch data, which could cause it to skip merged branches or archive the checked-out branch.
• History: Fixed the commit graph occasionally being drawn incorrectly after several quick refreshes, with lines coming from above the top commit or starting out of nowhere. In File History, commits that changed a file under a previous name now show their changes instead of an empty changeset.
• Diff View: Fixed "Show Diff" doing nothing when clicked while a large diff was still loading.
• Azure DevOps: Fixed the "Custom Service Pull Requests are not supported" error appearing for repositories with SSH remotes, or when the account name's capitalization differed from the remote URL.
• Auto Fetch: Fixed repositories continuing to fetch in the background after they were no longer open in a window, and changing the fetch interval triggering extra fetches. Both fixes reduce network and memory use.
• Preferences: Fixed Tower freezing when opening Preferences while Windows Explorer was not responding. The icons of your diff and merge tools now load in the background.
• License: Fixed Tower sometimes displaying an outdated license or trial status.

We hope you enjoy Tower 15 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!