CVSView - A Java/Swing graphical CVS history browser Hosted by

Release 0.2 is available!

CVSView is a simple Java/Swing application for browsing CVS based projects. The particular itch that this project scratched was a need to be able to more easily assign credit in group coding projects in our university courses. It should, however, be useful in any situation where one needs to better understand who contributed to the final, running code, and how.

It's still early days, but we already have something that is at least nominally useful. At the moment we can display files (that are assumed to be part of a CVS repository) using the output of "cvs annotate" with the lines of the file color coded by the login name of the user that committed that line (click on the reduced screen shot above for an example).

This project was started by Nic McPhee at the University of Minnesota, Morris. The project is being hosted by SourceForge. Feel free to visit the project page for more information, support requests, patch and bug submissions, etc.

Planned extensions include:

• A JTree style project file browser so you can go from file to file without having to exit and restart CVSView.
• The ability to edit the colors assigned to users (for cases where the default colors for two users are annoyingly close).
• The ability to color based on either revision numbers or commit dates.
• The ability to display log messages associated with revision numbers (through something like tooltips or a pop-up menu).
• The ability to select the revision of a file that you'd like to browse (at the moment you can only look at the latest revision).
• It would be nice to add an option to ignore trailing blank lines since it's so easy to add them with emacs.
• I'd like to add some functionality to "cvs annotate" that would allow one to "ignore" cases where the only change to a line is in the whitespace (like some of the options to "cvs diff"). This could then allow CVSView to "see through" changes in things like indentation. This requires hacking the code for CVS, though, so it's probably a lower priority.

Known bugs include:

• Selection isn't working right. The entire line should be highlighted, and it should allow for selection of multiple lines (both adjacent and scattered throughout the file).