Homebrew vs Tower

Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.

Once installed, you control Homebrew using the brew command. You can find packages using brew search, install them using brew install and remove them using brew uninstall.

Macports seems to be able to get into a bad state where new packages are unable to be installed, or installed software was unable to be updated. This simply hasn't happened with Homebrew. In addition to not having to deal with corruption problems, Homebrew installs packages in userland. Not requiring root to install software is a big win.

Homebrew as much as possible uses already existing libraries and tools to install software thus making builds quick and requiring few dependencies.

Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local. Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.

One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on.

Homebrew’s recipes try very hard to use the existing tools and libraries in OS/X, so they tend to build much faster and require fewer dependent libraries.

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.