Question

I work at a small company, and we connect to our development environment via SSH for commits and through SMB to just look through the file structure.

Before I commit my code, I want to be able to see a nice GUI Diff of the files that I am committing. I use Coda 2 to program, and unfortunately it’s Source Control support is shit and won’t detect that the SMB-mounted drive where my development directory is is also an SVN working copy, so all of its SCM tools are totally useless at work.

Anyway, because I am SSH’d in, I can’t use the opendiff or diffmerge commands (since they’re installed on my local computer and not on the remote server).

I’m wondering if anyone can give me a tip as to how I can call svn diff from the command line, but then look at it in a nice GUI display instead of the textual -/+ notation that SVN gives you on the command line.

Answer 1

If you have the preferred GUI tool installed in the server, just tunnel X through ssh like:

ssh -X yourworkserver

Then just lauch your tool of choice in the server as if it were an X capable terminal.

If your server does not have (the capability of having) the tools, you could always sync the stuff about to be committed to your local machine. E.g.

rsync -a --delete --partial --progress --rsh=ssh  username@yourserver:/path/to/code/about/to/be/committed /path/to/the/snapshot/in/your/machine

Then run your favourite GUI tool locally. You can add -az to speed the process up by compressing the traffic.

If your server has Ubuntu, have someone with privileges run “sudo apt-get install meld”, and use Meld over tunnelled X.

Most decent text editors (e.g. Emacs, Vim, …) have diff syntax highlighting included in the default configuration and they have text modes too.