I’ve been using CVS for a very long time now for version control. I used the command line tools happily for years, then some good GUI tools appeared. I never really liked some of them, but SmartCVS really stood out. I ended up buying a license for SmartCVS and was quite happy with it. Then I discovered TortoiseCVS. Not that SmartCVS is bad; on the contrary, it’s quite excellent. But for some reason TortoiseCVS just grabbed me. I have been using it ever since. (Of course, TortoiseCVS won’t help you if you’re not on a Windows box.)

Anyway, I was just working on some code, and I removed five files, by pressing <del> in Eclipse. When I went back over to my explorer Window and did a Commit, it showed me that those files had been removed, and would be committed thusly. That’s very nice. Using the command line tools, you have to do a “cvs remove foo.txt” on each file. I can’t remember if SmartCVS handles this properly (it probably does) but it was just nice to see that it understood what was going on. This tool has lots of nice little features like this that keep me happy.

Now, I will say that I’m not doing any sort of rocket science version control. It’s just middle of the road stuff. But this is a really nice tool. And they have a cute mascot. I may have to get one of those t-shirts.