Tower Interactive Rebase vs. Git CLI: Choosing How to Clean Up Local History

You have a feature branch with twelve commits, half of them "fix typo" and "wip", and you need a clean, reviewable history before opening a pull request. The decision is not whether to rebase interactively — it is whether to do it in Tower's GUI or with git rebase -i in a terminal. Both rewrite the same commits; they differ in feedback, error recovery, and scriptability.

The decision and its constraints

Choose Tower's Interactive Rebase when your work is routine history cleanup — reordering, squashing, rewording, and dropping commits on a local feature branch — and you value visual feedback over scriptability. Choose the CLI when you need automation, work over SSH on a headless machine, or want to stay in the terminal.

Either path carries the same hard constraints:

• The branch must be local-only, or you must be allowed to force-push. Interactive rebase rewrites commit hashes, so any shared copy of the branch diverges.
• The working directory should be clean before starting; stash or commit outstanding changes first.
• Tower's drag-and-drop interactive rebase UI requires Tower 9 or later on macOS or Windows. Older versions do not expose this workflow, so check your version before planning around it.

Comparing the supported options

Option	UI support	Conflict handling	Learning curve	Risk profile
Tower Interactive Rebase	Drag-and-drop reorder, squash, fixup, edit, reword	Integrated visual merge tool	Low	Low — recovery via reflog, no hand-edited todo file
git rebase -i (CLI)	Text todo list in your editor	Manual git mergetool invocation	Medium–high	Medium — a malformed todo file or wrong action keyword aborts or corrupts the plan
External GUI rebase plugins	Varies by tool	Varies by tool	Varies	Varies — evaluate per plugin

Trade-offs that actually matter

Tower's main advantage is that it removes the todo-file failure mode. In the CLI, the rebase plan is a text file where you change pick to squash or reorder lines; a typo or a swapped line produces an aborted rebase or an unintended result. In Tower you drag commits into order and pick actions from a menu, so the plan is always structurally valid before it runs.

Conflict resolution is the second differentiator. When a squash or reorder produces a conflict, Tower drops you into its built-in merge view with the conflicting hunks side by side. On the CLI you resolve conflicts in your editor or launch git mergetool separately, then remember to run git rebase --continue.

What you give up with Tower: scriptability and environment flexibility. A CLI rebase can be part of a shell script, run over SSH on a build server, or combined with --exec to run tests after each commit. Tower also requires a license, and its abstraction can hide details — such as exactly which commits were rewritten — that matter when debugging a rebase that went wrong.

Recovery is equivalent in both: Git's reflog records the pre-rebase HEAD regardless of which UI drove the operation. Tower surfaces undo more prominently, but git reflog plus git reset --hard works either way.

Concrete implementation in Tower

1. Open the repository in Tower and confirm the working directory shows no uncommitted changes.
2. In the sidebar, right-click the feature branch and choose Interactive Rebase….
3. Select the base commit — typically the commit where your branch diverged from main. Tower lists every commit after that point.
4. Drag commits to reorder them. Use the action menu on each commit to squash fixup commits into their parents, reword messages, or drop dead-end experiments.
5. Start the rebase. If a conflict appears, resolve it in Tower's merge view and continue.
6. Click Finish when the plan completes.

Validation

Do not trust the GUI alone. Verify the result from a terminal in the repository (no elevated permissions needed):

git log --oneline main..HEAD

Confirm the list shows the expected count of commits with the reworded messages, in the intended order. Then confirm a recovery point exists:

git reflog -10

You should see entries for the rebase steps and, before them, the branch's pre-rebase position — that entry is your undo target (git reset --hard HEAD@{n}) if the result is wrong.

If the branch was already pushed, update the remote safely:

git push --force-with-lease

--force-with-lease refuses the push if someone else updated the remote branch since your last fetch, which is the guard against clobbering a collaborator's work. Run it from your local clone with push permissions on the remote. The risk: if a teammate based work on your old commits, they must rebase onto the new history — coordinate before force-pushing shared branches.

Limitations

This guidance assumes Tower 9+ and a linear feature-branch cleanup. Tower's interactive rebase is not the right tool for rebasing across merge-heavy histories, for scripted batch cleanup across many branches, or on machines without a display. Version-specific UI labels may differ slightly across Tower releases; if a menu item described here is missing, check your Tower version first.