Brackets vs Tower

Brackets will automatically refresh the browser and load the latest saved version of a file open in the browser. This works with php as well. Editing a css will even highlight the tag that's currently being worked on. However, it only works with Chrome.

Brackets is easy on memory usage and it starts up quickly.

Brackets is entirely free and open source.

The functionality of Brackets can be extended via a simple-to-use extension manager. The extension manager also has a considerable number of extensions and themes.

A feature called "Quick Edit" allows the user to select a tag in (a html file, for example) and edit the associated style without switching over to the css document. It also supports SASS and LESS pre-processors.

Brackets is being actively maintained and developed.

Hovering over colors hex codes or image paths will pop up previews of corresponding colors and images.

Brackets supports drag and drop of text, as well as multi / rectangular selection.

The editor is built using html, css, and javascript, making it extendable by any front-end developer.

You can have your cursor independently on multiple lines and so creating templates and/or editing multiple things at once is really fast and easy.

Vim-style editing is already built in the text editor.

A default extension allows for the extraction of PSD resources, such as images and styles. There's good integration for placing extracted resources into source.

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.