The TextMate Subversion Bundle

Now that you’ve got Subversion working and have a basic understanding of the command line, I’ll show you how I make life a little easier for myself. I experimented with a few graphical clients but actually found working with the TextMate Subversion Bundle to be the easiest way to go. If you need to update your bundle, see the instructions below, otherwise, jump to the second section!

Checking Out the Bundle

It’s been brought to my attention that the Subversion bundle is included with TextMate. The following instructions are left for people that want to update their bundle, but should not be necessary to use the bundle. Sorry for any confusion!

If you already have a TextMate subversion checkout, you can skip the first couple of steps and just change to your bundles directory in your checkout. If not, lets go ahead and create the directory structure. So quit TextMate and from Terminal (or iTerm…):

If you’re using bash:

export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

If your using tcsh or zsh:

setenv LC_CTYPE en_US.UTF-8

You may want to put these lines into your ~/.bash_profile, ~/.tcshrc or ~/.zshrc file, depending on your shell.

Now to check out the bundle. For more information on this, see the Bundles section of the manual, or the Subversion Checkout section of the Wiki.

mkdir -p /Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles
cd /Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles
svn co http://macromates.com/svn/Bundles/trunk/Bundles/Subversion.tmbundle

You can update this bundle, and any other bundles you’ve checked out in this manner at any time by typing:

cd /Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles
svn up *.tmbundle

It’s a good idea to keep track of changes to the bundles, which you can do using the RSS feed for Bundle Changes.

Using the Bundle

It’s easiest to work in a project. Open up the entire site or just a directory by typing mate [dir] at the command line. This assumes, of course, that you’ve installed the command line tool. Once you’ve got the project open, and assuming it’s a working copy of a Subversion repository, you can test out the Subversion bundle by opening a file, selecting the root directory of the project, and typing ⌃-⇧-A. Select “status” from the pop-up menu and you should be presented with an HTML output showing the result of the svn status command for the directory. It may be empty if you’ve already committed all recent changes.

Now you can edit and add new files to the project, check the status and then use ⌃-⇧-A to check the status. When you’re ready to commit, select the root directory, pull up the Subversion menu and select “Commit” (5). It will ask you for a commit message, which you should always add despite the fact that it will allow you to leave it blank. Pressing the Commit button will then handle the transfer and give you the new Revision number. You can also commit a single file, directory or file selection from the project drawer.

The menu contains commands for running diffs, reverting files, and if you have the proper utilities installed, merging with FileMerge.

If you’ve got a basic grasp on Subversion, exploring the bundle should be pretty simple.

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