Path Finder meets Subversion

We listened to your numerous requests and we're glad to offer you our brand new Subversion client in Path Finder 4.7.

If you never used Subversion, you should try it out. Basically it's like Time Machine without those cool flying windows on a stars background :) (mmm, it's the other way round actually - Time Machine is like Subversion, but nevermind) Versionning systems like CVS and later Subversion were used by programmers since decades to be able to go back in time and revert to an earlier state in case they broke something. And yes, this happens. It even happened during our work on this Path Finder release. Steve updated to the new iTerm and made lots of custom changes to the code. At some point we noticed an annoying flickering when scrolling in terminal which was not present in iTerm itself. It was clear that Steve introduced this bug himself, but the quantity of the changes was so significant at that point that it was impossible to remember where and when it happened. Subversion came to rescue - first we reverted the code to the state it was two months before that, it worked fine. Then we took the revision of last month - it was broken. Then we went two weeks back from there, it still worked. And so on. At the end in less than one hour (of which most of the time was spent recompiling) we were able to isolate one line of code that introduced the bug. And that was very cool! :) You can find more about Subversion here and find the installer package here.

SPOD? No thanks...

A lot of questions arose when we started to brainstorm about this feature. There is a bunch of Subversion clients out there, but somehow most of the people I know end up going back to Terminal for one or another reason. Maybe because it's quick and simple, not sure. So we wanted to come up with something very simple and fast, yet sufficient for every day use. Something that we would use ourselves instead of Terminal actually :) So the first concern was speed, we wanted to avoid at any price that the whole browser beachballs and stalls when polling for svn updates and that's what could happen if we tried to show svn status directly inside the browser for example. So we decided to make a separate, independent section in the bottom preview pane which only asks the browser which folder is currently selected and then does it's job without disturbing any other actions you might be executing in the browser.

Subversion client for the rest of us...

Using Subversion in Path Finder is pretty straightforward. You don't need to do any setup if you already have a repository and Subversion is installed on your computer. Select your working copy in the browser or in the shelf and open the subversion pane (select it from a list in the bottom pane) or window (Window -> SVN Window). Now you have a set of commands that you can use immediately. Some of them will require additional input of arguments, in this case there will be a panel popping up where you'll be able to enter them. If you want to use a command that is not listed, no problem - click on "Other" and type your command (without word "svn") with any arguments you want just like you would do in Terminal (actually it just launches a shell in the background and executes it exactly as if you would type it in Terminal). We used "raw" command for debugging - to see all the output that svn generates without formatting. We decided to leave it there in case you would like to see what's Path Finder doing exactly and in case we need to see what's happening if you encounter problems.

We warmly welcome your feedback about this feature. Please let us know what you like and what you hate about it. We're listening :)