Comments on: Subversion Client Issues

By: mike

mike — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:37:45 +0000

Randolf – thanks, I hadn’t heard of smartSVN. It looks interesting, but I couldn’t tell what the commit workflow is like – their screenshots are all cropped a little too much. Sounds like it’s pretty powerful, though.

The lack of SVN feature coverage in the other tools is mostly OK with me, though – I’m fine with using the command line for some things. I just like to have a GUI for the most frequent tasks.

By: Randolf

Randolf — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 08:57:46 +0000

Versions and Cornerstone are blenders, they just look good but if you scratch on their surface they support only a minor feature set of SVN. This might be enough for home users but not for professional development. Hence, after a longer period of comparison, our company decided to take smartSVN Professional. It does not look that nice as the mentioned “blenders”, but is faster, works perfectly and is easier to learn. The price for the Professional version are peanuts compared to the price of a good developer.

By: mike

mike — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:22:22 +0000

Abhi, thanks for the screenshots! I hadn't seen TM's SVN support in action before. I think it looks like TM has a similar feature set to emacs' VC-mode, so I'm actually less likely to try it after seeing those screenshots. I was expecting an acclaimed mac-only editor to be more shiny...

Plus, I'm more likely to hack emacs lisp than TM ruby. But that's just familiarity I guess.

I've posted a screen cap of how I use VC-mode in emacs as a new post.

By: Abhi Beckert

Abhi Beckert — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:37:24 +0000

You should definitely try textmate.

Simply install textmate (and open it at least once to install the command line tool), then cd into the root directory of your source code, and type mate .

The UI is a bit clunky... unfortunately you also have to open a file... or textmate's scripting isn't available, then select the root directory of the website in the project draw and press control-shift-a (or use the menus) to bring up the SVN menu.

Here is a screenshot of how I use it in your scenario, project on the left, status (and log of commits) on the right, and click the "diff" buttons to see the changes: http://tweetit.net/70nwm4

And here is a screenshot of the non-modal commit window: http://tweetit.net/r7hj3i the commit window also allows you to untick individual files, which is a nice way to tweak which files get committed while you are typing in the commit message.

And from within the svn st and svn ci windows, you can do tasks like svn add/revert.

Plus, the entire SVN module is written in Ruby, and is open source. So you can hack it.

TextMate is not pretty, and a few things are clunky. But it is very functional. I have tried all the different svn tools (some of them for months at a time), and have finally settled on a combination of TextMate and Terminal for doing svn operations. Terminal when it's simple, textmate when it's not.

By: mike

mike — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:36:34 +0000

Interesting. I couldn’t find a good screenshot for what that looks like on the macromates site, but it’s probably moot anyway. Being mostly an emacs user, I really can’t imagine myself ever paying for an editor.

By: Jenny Walsh

Jenny Walsh — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:15:38 +0000

The SVN client in TextMate does allow you to edit the message and look at diffs at the same time. Of course this is no help if you prefer another editor…

By: Steve Breen

Steve Breen — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:58:46 +0000

I had the same issue when I used SVN and Cornerstone.

I ended up typing up the commit notes in some other editor (Xcode, TextMate, yada) while browsing diffs and then just copy/paste the thing into Cornerstone to do the commit.