Subclipse is a SVN plugin for Aptana, and it allows you to interact with the SVN server from within the IDE. However getting this running properly on my Ubuntu 8.04 machine proved to be more challenging than just installing it.

The problem I was having was that when I went to talk to the SVN server, it would always ask me for my username and password, there was no option to remember it. I thought this a little strange and upon visiting the preferences dialog (Window->Preferences->Team->SVN) I was greeted by a nice error “Failed to load JavaHL library”. Which of course meant I couldn’t change any options without it bitching that it wasn’t available.

So how do we fix this? First off…

sudo apt-get install libsvn-java

Then, if you’re lucky, you should just have to restart Aptana in order for it to now detect it. However, if your machine was like mine and it didn’t detect it then you’ll need to do the following. Go to where Aptana is installed, for me this was /usr/local/aptana

cd /usr/local/aptana
gedit AptanaStudio.ini

You’ll then need to add the following line to the end of this file

-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni

That’s technically it, all you should need to do now is save the file, restart Aptana and it’ll be working for you. Well, I say you, I mean me

So now that JavaHL is installed correctly, when I next talked to the SVN server, it once again, asked me for my login details, however a lovely “Save Credentials” checkbox appeared saving my sanity from inputting my details everytime.

So, this morning I finally entertained Tortoise’s incessant whining to update to its latest version (1.5.2) and I took the plunge. The one thing that annoys me the most about the upgrade process is the fact I have to restart the machine in order for the installation to finish, this I find is so archaic and out of date compared to 99% of all other software installation. (Obviously I’m not stupid enough to realise that there’s quite a bit of interaction on the OS level with Tortoise, but still, it’s one annoyance I would rather do without)

Once I’m restarted and on the go again, I go to browse one of my SVN directories and I’m greeted with some disgusting icons. They’ve gone and replaced the XPStyle icon set with some… quite frankly, god awful ones. They blur horribly at 16×16 size and just don’t look nice at all in my opinion, so it was then finding out how to change the icons.

1. Right click on the desktop and in “TortoiseSVN” click “Settings”
2. Select “Icon Set” from the left tree menu
3. Then using the drop down to change to which icon set suits you.
4. Restart the machine (*sigh*)

%commonprogramfiles%\TortoiseOverlays\icons

If you’re a programmer of some description and you use SVN and develop on Windows then chances are you’ll either be using SVN with TortoiseSVN, or you’ll be like one of those trendy kids using GIT. However, those cool kids don’t yet have something like TortoiseGIT. But I’m sure that once it comes out that these optimizations will still apply.

The part of TortoiseSVN that really slows down PC’s is the “TSVNCache.exe” file. This basically allows for drawing of the icons on-top of files and folders to indicate their SVN status. However, doing this requires a lot of monitoring of literally all your files and folders. So whats the most obvious thing to do? Restrict what Tortoise monitors as it goes about its work. We do that as follows…

1. Right click on your desktop and select “Settings” from the Tortoise context menu.
2. In the tree view on the left select “Icon Overlays”
3. In the “Exclude Paths” box put in C:\*, this will exclude the entire drive from being monitored. You’ll want to put in the drive names of all your fixed drives to stop those being monitored as well.
4. In the “Includes Paths” box put in the root of your development directories, I only use one, however you may use many scattered across your drive. I simply put in C:\SVN\*
5. Press “ok” to apply these changes.
6. Either reboot your machine, or, if your like me, open up task manager and kill “TSVNCache.exe” and load up a folder associated with SVN and it should re-start itself.

Other improvements can be made by setting Tortoise to only show the icon overlays when you are browsing directories with explorer. By default whenever you have an open/save dialog it will load in and show you those. These can be disabled by the following…

1. Right click on your desktop and select “Settings” from the Tortoise context menu.
2. In the tree view on the left select “Icon Overlays”
3. Check the box for “Show overlays and context menu only in explorer”
4. Press “ok” to apply these changes.
5. Either reboot your machine, or, if your like me, open up task manager and kill “TSVNCache.exe” and load up a folder associated with SVN and it should re-start itself.