Subversion and Apple Filemerge Integrtaion

NOTE: This is an old article I wrote in January 2007, it’s still relevant today. It was originally posted on luckydonkey.com which I am in the process of retiring.

If you want visual diff’s while developing on OSX using subversion then this page has a good description of how to set it up and some scripts to wrap Apple’s FileMerge application to give to nice visual merges/diffs.

Image of Filemerge

The author doesn’t mention it but rather then pass the path to the scripts to svn via the —diff-cmd option to can edit ~/.subversion/config and enter the full path to the scripts in the diff-cmd variable. Note it needs to be the full path as shell variables wont be expanded (so ~/bin/fmdiff will fail with error 255)

PS: I have nothing against the text based diffing tools so please don’t flame me. After all I’m a Mac user so what do I know of such magic.