www.giannistsakiris.com

No doubt that TortoiseSVN is a killer app. Once you’ve tasted it you are not willing to compromise with anything less.

When I needed a graphical subversion client for GNU/Linux, I did my little search and took some shots on some of the clients I found, but the results were very disappointing as I couldn’t find anything that could mimic TortoiseSVN even by the tiniest bit.

Thankfully, at least there was one client that offers the closest to what I wanted, and it comes from the realm of KDE: kdesvn. It can preview a versioned directory, that means that you can view at a glance all the files that require your attention. It can also open a repository and let you browse its structure (similar, to TortoiseSVN’s repo-browser). In combination with kompare, a graphical front-end for diff, it can nicely display changes in files.

To install kdesvn and kompare in your Ubuntu system run:

sudo apt-get install subversion kdesvn kompare

For convenience I use two custom nautilus-scripts, one for previewing and one for repository browsing:

kdesvn-preview:
#!/bin/sh
kdesvn $1

kdesvn-repo-browser:
#!/bin/sh
kdesvn `svn info $1 | head -n 2 | tail -n +2 | awk ‘{print substr($0,6)}’`

kdesvn-preview will open the selected directory for preview in kdesvn. kdesvn-repo-browser will open the directory of the repository that corresponds to the selected directory (or the current directory if you have not selected anything).

See also: custom context menus with nautilus scripts