This morning I found out about SmartCVS; a really nice looking GUI client for CVS. I’ve been using WinCVS for a while now, but (no offense to the developers!) it just didn’t feel right. I can’t explain it, but it just didn’t give me all that I wanted. (Laugh all you want about SourceSafe, but that is a really nice client tool.)

Anyway, I just downloaded SmartCVS a few minutes ago and started playing with it. It’s written in Java so it will run on lots of OSs, and it’s fast too. It looks a lot like IntelliJ IDEA and apparently JetBrains has signed some sort of license with SmartCVS to incorporate it into IDEA. There is a free version and a “pro” version with more features. A single license of the pro version is $45 USD which doesn’t sound too bad. I’m going to keep using the free version for a while to make sure I really like it, but thus far it looks like a great tool.

Now if someone would just create a cvs client that can use a proxy! I’m behind a firewall that blocks most useful ports, one of which is 2401… Sigh…