But then again, I could never do things in tower as fast as I could on the command line, so I dropped it fairly fast. It's not super useful replacement without an interactive rebase. Nice for viewing history, though.
Are you intentionally ignoring the context in which I mentioned Tower?
The alternative app to tower on FreeBSD would be git itself, which had a superset of features, would it not?
Your getting hung up on the Tower example, Tower is far from the only example of OS X applications having a smoother UI than nix. I always felt it comes down to a culture issue, nix users don't mind the lack of polished GUIs if there's a command line tool (which you're so continently demonstrating)
Tower and GitUp are a huge lock-in into macOS for me. Tower for line-by-line staging/discarding, GitUp for minor history fix-ups (editing a commit message without remembering the CLI command, etc.).
I have complaints about the UI changes in OS X sometimes but it's still not as bad as half the Linux applications I'd use in place of OS X ones like Tower
And every time I try Linux i still have issues like the "sleep of death" and NVIDIA Optimus support being in poorly documented limbo (your dedicated GPU is both in use and out of use until you run a graphical benchmark and measure the current draw of your laptop)
And I prefer Homebrew to apt. I've never had Homebrew fail to install other packages because I had a package install break previously, which is always something that drove me nuts about apt.