Useful subversion shell aliases
A friend tossed me a handful of aliases that, once plopped into your shells initialization scripts, make dealing with Subversion all that much more pleasant. It was one of those “Oh, jeez, that is so stupid obvious… why didn’t I think of that” moments.
Drop the aliases into wherever your shell sets up aliases (~/.tcsrhc or ~/bashrc or something like it, typically). The syntax may be different.
alias M 'svn diff \!* | mate' alias G 'svn diff \!* | mate' alias U 'svn diff \!* | mate' alias R 'svn diff' alias C 'see' alias A 'true' alias D 'true' alias I 'true'
Once in place, you can now triple-click-copy-paste any line in the subversion output to see more detailed information.
Update: I updated the M, G, and U aliases to both use TextMate and to work fine with multiple arguments (just because it seemed like an appropriately big stick to bring to the party).
For example, an ‘svn status’ on my PyObjC work area outputs the following:
[pyobjc/trunk/pyobjc] bbum% svn status M Lib/AppKit/test/test_nsopenpanel.py
I simply triple-click the M Lib/AppKit/test/test_nsopenpanel.py and copy/paste/return. Subversion will then display the differences between what is in my workarea and what is currently in the repository.
The third command will cause the conflicted file to open in SubEthaEdit. Change it to mate for TextMate or bbedit for BBEdit.
In ~/.subversion/config, I have:
diff-cmd = /Volumes/Data/Users/bbum/bin/svndiffshim.py
svndiffshim.py lives in my hacques repository. Once in place, it causes diffs to open in FileMerge.
If you don’t want to use FileMerge (or bbdiff), change the two svn diff aliases to clear && svn diff. This will cause the Terminal window to be cleared prior to displaying the output.
Update(s):
- Michael McCracken reminded me that I really ought to go look at my application menus a bit more often. Terminal includes Paste Selection (and Paste Escaped Text, another useful idiom I forgot about). So, triple-click, then hit shift-cmd-V to paste the selected line. One less keystroke!
- Dominik Wagner mentions that he uses svn diff | see -m diff to cause the diff to be opened and nicely colorized in SubEthaEdit. Very nice.
As an improvement in the above context, I aliased it to svn diff \!* | see -m diff as that fixes two problems. First, it only diffs the file copy/pasted. Secondly, it doesn’t also open the file(s).
Of course, all of this now means that M is an super-tiny abbreviation for Diff This Stuff Now.
- Wilfredo Sánchez Vega added the true aliases as seen above. It allows you to copy/paste in a large chunk of the output without having to worry about silly syntax errors. Of course, there are still a number of edge cases — if the other columns are used or ‘?’ in the output — but this makes it much more generic.
March 13th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
[...] Bill Bumgarner gets creative with shell aliases that cause svn’s status lines to be independently executable commands. One can’t help but be reminded of the old MPW days. Link. [...]
March 13th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
Nice tip!
You probably already know this, but since you wrote “Copy/Paste/Return” and we are talking about shaving steps, don’t forget that in Terminal.app, Shift-Cmd-V lets you skip the “Copy” step – it just pastes the current selection.
March 13th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
Great aliases. On a sidenote: do an “svn diff | see -m diff” to get a nicely colored diff in subethaedit (since 2.3) – i myself aliased that to svndiff.
March 13th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
oh – and i forgot my svnadd alias: svnadd – really helpful to easily add files not yet added.
March 13th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
While we’re swapping fancy svn aliases, here’s my handy finger-pointing alias/function (bash-version)
# Usage: blameline
alias blameline='SvnBlameLine'
SvnBlameLine() {
svn blame "$1" | cat -n | egrep --context=3 "^[[:space:]]*$2\b"
}
Still need to make it (efficiently, i.e. not do the ‘svn blame’ twice) parse out the revision number of the line in question and automatically follow up with an ‘svn log -r123′, as I almost always want that.
March 13th, 2006 at 9:12 pm
On a somewhat related note, I find that few people are aware of /usr/bin/pbcopy and /usr/bin/pbpaste. Check their man pages, they’re quite handy.
-jcr
March 14th, 2006 at 5:56 am
Ok, one final note – I just added this to my .bash_profile
function M() {
svn diff $* | see -m diff -t “diff: $*”
}
which shows what is diffed nicely in the title.
cheers,
dom
March 14th, 2006 at 11:24 am
Bill, even better than Shift-Cmd-V is the middle-click, if you have it. We cloned that xterm feature in Terminal after so many people asked for it.
March 14th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
Good stuff, folks!
What I really want is colorized svn output (e.g. a line reporting a conflict shows up in red, etc). I swear that some version of cvs I ran at some point in the past had this built-in, but AFAICT there’s no such thing in svn. Could be handled by a wrapper somehow I suppose. Any ideas?
March 14th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
Oops… errr, hooray for google! Here’s what I was after:
http://webcvs.kde.org/kdesdk/scripts/colorsvn?rev=1.2&view=auto
March 14th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
Here is my svn diffing tcsh alias
alias svndiff ‘/opt/local/bin/svn diff –diff-cmd twdiff \!*’
Use it just like svn diff but get bbedit/textwangler diff view. I’m just it could be used with mate or see, also.
March 15th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
What I don’t get is WHY I need to go into terminal at all? Why doesn’t XCode hide all this mess from me completely?
I whish there was a published API in XCode where we could add our OWN version control stuff, because I would fix the subversion stuff in there promptly. Maybe I will look at the XCode docs — they may have slipped just that in there somewhere…
March 15th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
Xcode’s subversion support could certainly use some improvement, no doubt about it.
But there will always be a need to go to something outside of Xcode to deal with revision control. Repositories span much more than just Xcode/Eclipse/DevStudio projects — there are many, many things that may be found well outside the project.
March 15th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Second to middle-click approach is the triple-click then click-drag-drop.
May 2nd, 2006 at 11:19 am
I always knew we were doing a poor job of advertising SCM (a GPL front-end to various revision control systems)! You’ve prompted me to write Why you should use jessies.org SCM tools.
May 2nd, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Except that SCM appears to be far from ready for prime time. A quick perusal reveals that the stuff shipped in the tarball linked to from that site is hardwired to paths that only exist on the developer’s machine.
Looks interesting. Needs some cleanup before it is useful (to me). I look forward to checking it out.
May 15th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
> A quick perusal reveals that the stuff shipped in the tarball linked to from that site is hardwired to paths that only exist on the developer’s machine.
that shouldn’t be the case. plenty of other people are using it, on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows, and with BitKeeper, CVS, and Subversion. (i don’t know of anyone seriously using the Bazaar back-end yet.)
could you report your problems to the email address in the README file, please? (or to the address i gave when entering this, which i assume you can see.)
we do have a *long* way to go to be a typical .app-in-a-.dmg Mac OS experience — it’s not obvious how we’d fit that model, and we hate .pkg packages to the extent that we never install them ourselves, so don’t expect others to. but for anyone prepared and able to build from source and put the bin/ directory on their path, we should “just work”. if we don’t, i’d like to fix it.
(sorry for the delay; a user just pointed me at this. blog comments are such an impractical way to hold a conversation!)
May 22nd, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Don’t forget the official BBEdit way to do this http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/arch_bbedit81.shtml. I added:
to
~/.subversion/config, and can nowsvn diff(with or without arguments) to get BBEdit to DWIM.Additionally, I tweaked my profile and created a helper script for programs which reject arguments (spaces) in
EDITOR:pepper@pepperbook:~$ grep -C3 PAGER bin/profile.sh if [ -x ~/bin/edit.sh ] then export EDITOR=~/bin/edit.sh export PAGER="col -b | bbedit --clean --view-top" else export EDITOR=vi fi # [ -x ~/bin/edit.sh ] pepper@pepperbook:~$ cat bin/edit.sh #!/bin/sh # Edit a file in BBEdit (if available), for programs that don't support arguments in $EDITOR. if [[ $SSH_TTY ]] then # Remote vi "$@" else # Local bbedit --wait --resume "$@" fiNow
svn ci,crontab,man, etc. all use BBEdit when available, orviwhen I’m logged in through a text-only connection (ssh).Edit: bbum moved some tags around to make it more readable in the context of my rather stupid CSS.
June 28th, 2006 at 8:13 am
[...] bbum’s weblog-o-mat » Blog Archive » Useful subversion shell aliases a handful of aliases that, once plopped into your shells initialization scripts, make dealing with Subversion all that much more pleasant. (tags: Subversion svn terminal bash command line version control tool tips unix) [...]
October 17th, 2006 at 5:37 am
[...] Inspired by bbum’s Useful subversion shell aliases I decided to to try them out for myself. Of course nothing is ever easy and they needed to be converted from aliases to functions to work under bash, as bash doesn’t support passing arguments according to Google. [...]
November 1st, 2006 at 12:23 am
Some improved aliases for use with BBEdit:
alias A=’bbedit’
alias AM=’svn diff –diff-cmd bbdiff –extensions “–resume –wait”‘
alias C=’bbedit’
alias D=’true’
alias G=’svn diff –diff-cmd bbdiff –extensions “–resume –wait”‘
alias I=’true’
alias M=’svn diff –diff-cmd bbdiff –extensions “–resume –wait”‘
alias R=’svn diff –diff-cmd bbdiff –extensions “–resume –wait”‘
alias U=’bbedit’
This week I’m reviewing the total changes over about 50 revisions, when I wasn’t keeping up with my collaborator. I added ” -r848″ (the version I was caught up, before he started making changes I want to review) to the M & AM aliases, and I can now paste in a few lines from the “svn update” output to review changes one file at a time.
Note that the “
--wait” is necessary, as otherwise successive diffs overwrite the.tmpfile BBEdit compares against, and earlier comparisons break.November 1st, 2006 at 12:50 am
Der! ‘AM’ is equivalent to ‘A’ for this purpose, not to ‘M’.
December 29th, 2006 at 1:00 am
[...] I use vi daily, but much prefer BBEdit. The way I integrate them has evolved over time (see previous posts here, Useful subversion shell aliases, and BBEdit Gems (which appears to be down right now). In particular, I no longer configure BBEdit directly in ~/.subversion/config. [...]
April 21st, 2009 at 6:54 pm
@Ben Holt
Thanks for posting your blame alias, it’s a handy idea! I tweaked it a bit, and though I haven’t added the svn log functionality, I have made it work with 0 or more line number arguments (When you don’t supply any, it prints the entire blame output with line numbers.)
svnblame() {
if [ $# -lt 1 ]
then
echo "Please specify a file to examine for blame data."
else
resource="$1"
blame=$(svn blame "$resource" | cat -n)
if [ $# -lt 2 ]
then
echo "$blame"
else
shift
while [ $# -ne 0 ]; do
echo "=== "$resource":"$1
echo "$blame" | egrep --context=3 "^[[:space:]]*$1\b"
shift
done
fi
fi
}