Eclipse: SVN and CVS GUI on OS X

I have been programming on Mac OS X for roughly a year now, and make constant use of SVN and CVS through open source software projects. The whole time I have been in search of a GUI client for SVN and CVS that was free, logical, and somewhat elegant in it’s feature set.

I first looked at some of the OS X native offerings, and was only able to come up with hacky, ugly, non-functional GUI’s that slowed down my usage of CVS and SVN. Xcode has a built in version control, but from what I have found it doesn’t handle passwords, and needed the use of an additional piece of software for public private keys to work. The other options just never compared to tortoiseCVS or tortoiseSVN on the Windows platform.

So, today I bring you Eclipse… I have never used Eclipse for any software development before, and do not know it’s strengths or weaknesses as an IDE for coding. However, I have been using Eclipse with CVS and SVN plug-ins that satisfy my every need. Being able to visually compare your code differences from your local copy and the server copy is an essential tool that I use daily, and Eclipse handles this beautifully.

First you will need to download Eclipse, I opted for the stripped down version referred to as the Platform Runtime Library as I do not need the other functionality, and it weights in at about 33MB’s. This would be all you need to start enjoying CVS access from Eclipse. Next if you would also like SVN access you will need to grab subclipse, an Eclipse plug-in for SVN access. On Mac OS X you also need SVN installed with SSH and JavaHL bindings. Luckily for us the Metissian Packages are available for download in binary form.

There you have it, everything you need to get started with CVS and SVN in Eclipse on Mac OS X. I have listed some additional links to tutorials that may be useful as well.

http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/CVS_Howto - From the Eclipse Wiki
http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/~dquigley/cse219/index.php?it=eclipse&tt=cvs - Tutorial by David Quigley
http://svn.collab.net/subclipse/help/index.jsp - Documentation for subclipse
http://open.ncsu.edu/se/tutorials/subclipse/ - A tutorial for subclipse from NCSU