When comparing Mou vs Tower, the Slant community recommends Tower for most people. In the question“What are the best developer tools for Mac OSX?” Tower is ranked 7th while Mou is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Tower is:
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.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Advanced text editing
Mou has word auto-completion (accessed via 'esc') for English words, text transformation such as conversions to uppercase, blockquote or an h1 heading, HTML entities (such as <’s, &’s and spaces) that can be added anywhere in the text and customizable keyboard shortcuts for everything allowing for efficient use of the software's capabilities.
Pro Full syntax highlighting
Mou provides full syntax highlighting for Markdown. The highlighting can be customized manually or by applying a predefined theme.
Pro Has real-time split-screen preview
Mou is split into two columns. It displays raw Markdown on the left and formatted text on the right. Text on the right will update in near real-time as raw Markdown is written.
Pro Powerful search
Mou can do incremental ("find as you type") pattern matching search. For example, it can find all words that have x as the third letter followed by at least 4 more letters and a line break.
Pro Free beta versions
Mou is available as a free download up until the release of 1.0.
Pro Customizable
The whole editor can be customized using different color schemes and users can create own variations by editing CSS.
Pro Support for CJK characters
Mou supports CJK characters for writing Markdown in Chinese, Japanese or Korean.
Pro Export as HTML or PDF
Markdown can be exported as an HTML or a PDF file. Each export can also be styled by a custom CSS.
Pro Customizable keyboard shortcuts
Mou has keyboard shortcuts for all text manipulation actions allowing for highly efficient use of the software. These shortcuts can also be manually edited to better fit each individual workflow.
Pro Includes optional typewriter keypress sounds
The app includes optional atmospheric typewriter sounds that are triggered with each keypress. These can be enabled in the settings.
Pro Scriptogr.am & Tumblr integration via Dropbox
Mou allows writing and publishing to blogs from within the editor.
Pro Pretty, modern-looking user interface
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.
Pro Offers a visual way to solve conflicts
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.
Pro Github integration
Pro Very polished user interface
Pro Cherry-Picking via drag and drop
Pro Git LFS
Tower comes with built-in support for Git LFS. Handy when working with large files.
Pro Git-flow integration
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.
Pro The UI only shows the needed commands at a time
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.
Pro Free for students
If you are a student, you can get your free Tower Pro license here.
Pro Interactive Rebase via Drag and Drop
Pro Undo Support
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
Pro GPG support
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.
Cons
Con No longer maintained
The latest version was released in 2014, version 1.0 was announced for 2015 but was never released. The app is not compatible with macOS Sierra.
Con Only free until 1.0 release
Once 1.0 is released (still unreleased as of May 2017, release was planned for August 2015), Mou will cost $30. It can currently be pre-ordered for half the price.
Con Text is hard to read on a big screen in full-screen mode
On big screens legibility is pretty bad when entering full-screen mode because the text is not columned nor centered. On smaller screens though, legibility is quite good even on full-screen.
Con Doesn't work as well with non-monospaced fonts
When using a non-monospaced font, the text jiggles around. It can be very annoying since users may not always want to write with a monospaced font.
Con Switching live preview on/off changes the width of text area
Con v1.0 was promised to Indiegogo founders more than a year ago
Safe to say this is dead software at this point.
Con Not free/libre
This application is proprietary, and thus cannot be modified or freely distributed.
Con Expensive
Costs $69 per year!
Con Inefficient UI
In order to not overwhelm the users with information, much of the information is either hidden by default or requires navigating to a different section to access.
Con Doesn't have a built in diff
Con Stability issues on Windows
On a simple repository, the UI often lags or freezes.