MacPorts vs Tower

MacPorts eschews Apple-supplied libraries and links sources against its own making sure that the experience is the same regardless of what OS X version is used.

Detailed instructions on the homepage are easy to follow. Official GUI app is also available

MacPorts generally gets new software soon after it's available. This way users will not have to worry if their software is up to date.

MacPorts has a variants system that allows customizing builds with author provided options.

As of this writing, 20K packages. 3 to 5x more than other current package managers.

No need to worry if some rogue app will change your binaries or configuration.

Considering just how often Apple breaks things, any reduplication of of Apple-supplied libraries with the canonical sources is an asset.

Written in Tcl & C, it's generally significantly faster than the competition. Tcl is also quite readable and comparable to Ruby, so it's also friendly to newcomers.

Homebrew dropped support for old Macs. MacPorts still supports them.

No need to install Ruby, or any other programming language.

With Apple moving over to its own silicon, macports has been ready for the move to ARM since 2.6.4

Reading the story behind MacPorts, it is the only one that was developed by Apple by an Apple employee. In fact it is the same person that was responsible for creating the FreeBSD port system.

For example, trying to install Finch using Pkgsrc doesn't work, while installing it using MacPorts works perfectly. Finch isn't even on Homebrew's radar.

Tower has a good-looking interface and consists of 3 main views - services, repositories and repository.

• Services view for managing integrations with hosting services like GitHub, Bitbucket and Beanstalk.

• Repositories view for organizing local and remote repositories into folders and getting general overview about them.

• Repo view that consists of two main subviews:

  • Working copy view shows modified files and their diff and allows wrapping up changes in a commit.

  • History shows commits alongside metadata and projects file structure.

Additionally, it allows performing various tasks such as merging branches via drag & drop, search allows searching by message, commit hash, author, committer and file and there's a quick open that allows fuzzy-searching for folder names.

Tower shows conflicting files, their authors and the commit that made changes. It then allows selecting which files should be used in the final result.

Tower comes with built-in support for Git LFS. Handy when working with large files.

Git-flow provide a consistent development process by defining a strict branching model that is great for managing large projects. T2 allows setting up and integrating into repos that follow this model.

Tower covers most of the daily tasks that a developer may need to complete. It shows only what you need for the most common tasks without overwhelming the user.

If you are a student, you can get your free Tower Pro license here.

Many Git actions can be undone in Tower simply by using the keyboard shortcut CMD+Z. Examples: Deleting branches and files, staging changes, rebasing & merging branches, or publishing a branch on a remote

Tower offers user profiles. You can then connect GPG keys with your profiles, sign commits and see which commits have been signed and by who.