Question

Is it possible to get use svn in combination with vim to get a series of tab pages which contain a diff of each file? It would be a much better alternative to svn diff | view -, but instead of a linear list of diffs it would use vimdiff.

In the past, I have found a way to do this and get svn diff to open multiple vims for each file edited, but being able to go back and review old files would be very useful. Therefore, given a set of tuples of files S, I need a vim shell command which will open each file in the first position of the tuples of S in a different tab page and diff it with the corresponding file in the second position of the tuples in S.

Answer 1

This can be done with a couple of scripts, and making use of vim’s “server” functionality. The scripts below could be improved a bit, for example it assumes that you want to do this in graphical Vim, and that you don’t want the script to exit until you quit this Vim. Also, the diffs default to using a horizontal split due to using “diffsplit”.

I do it with the following two scripts. Execute the bash script in the directory you want to run the diff in:

#!/bin/bash

export VIM_SERVERNAME="SVN-$RANDOM"

# Start up a vim, graphical, in the foreground, but backgrounded...
vim -g -f --servername "$VIM_SERVERNAME" &
# So we get can it's PID to wait on later
gvim_pid=$!

# Wait for the server to start up enough
sleep 0.5

# Use svn diff to get the right set of files to pass to vimdiff
svn diff --diff-cmd "vim_tab_diff_helper.py" >/dev/null

# Move to the start of the list; remove the first tab which will be the empty
# tab
vim --servername "$VIM_SERVERNAME" --remote-send ":tabfirst<Return>"
vim --servername "$VIM_SERVERNAME" --remote-send ":bd<Return>"

# Wait for the user to exit vim before returning
wait $gvim_pid

The helper script “vim_tab_diff_helper.py” is as follows:

#!/usr/bin/python

import os
import subprocess
import sys

def vim_send(command):
  global vim_server
  subprocess.call(['vim', '--servername', vim_server, '--remote-send',
    command + '<Return>'])

vim_server = os.environ['VIM_SERVERNAME']
svn_orig_file = sys.argv[ len(sys.argv) - 2 ]
modified_file = sys.argv[ len(sys.argv) - 1 ]

vim_send(":tabnew")
vim_send(":e " + svn_orig_file)
vim_send(":diffsplit " + modified_file)