4.30. TortoiseSVN's Settings

Selects your user interface language. Of course, you have to install the corresponding language pack first to get another UI language than the default English one.

TortoiseSVN will contact its download site periodically to see if there is a newer version of the program available. If there is it will show a notification link in the commit dialog. Use Check now if you want an answer right away. The new version will not be downloaded; you simply receive an information dialog telling you that the new version is available.

TortoiseSVN has three custom sounds which are installed by default.

You can select different sounds (or turn these sounds off completely) using the Windows Control Panel. Configure is a shortcut to the Control Panel.

On Windows Vista and later systems this controls whether dialogs use the Aero styling.

On Windows 7 you can create a Library in which to group working copies which are scattered in various places on your system.

Global ignore patterns are used to prevent unversioned files from showing up e.g. in the commit dialog. Files matching the patterns are also ignored by an import. Ignore files or directories by typing in the names or extensions. Patterns are separated by spaces e.g. bin obj *.bak *.~?? *.jar *.[Tt]mp. These patterns should not include any path separators. Note also that there is no way to differentiate between files and directories. Read Section 4.13.1, “Pattern Matching in Ignore Lists” for more information on the pattern-matching syntax.

Note that the ignore patterns you specify here will also affect other Subversion clients running on your PC, including the command line client.

	Caution
	If you use the Subversion configuration file to set a global-ignores pattern, it will override the settings you make here. The Subversion configuration file is accessed using the Edit as described below.

This ignore pattern will affect all your projects. It is not versioned, so it will not affect other users. By contrast you can also use the versioned svn:ignore or svn:global-ignores property to exclude files or directories from version control. Read Section 4.13, “Ignoring Files And Directories” for more information.

This option tells TortoiseSVN to set the file dates to the last commit time when doing a checkout or an update. Otherwise TortoiseSVN will use the current date. If you are developing software it is generally best to use the current date because build systems normally look at the date stamps to decide which files need compiling. If you use “last commit time” and revert to an older file revision, your project may not compile as you expect it to.

Use Edit to edit the Subversion configuration file directly. Some settings cannot be modified directly by TortoiseSVN, and need to be set here instead. For more information about the Subversion config file see the Runtime Configuration Area . The section on Automatic Property Setting is of particular interest, and that is configured here. Note that Subversion can read configuration information from several places, and you need to know which one takes priority. Refer to Configuration and the Windows Registry to find out more.

This option tells TortoiseSVN to always apply local modifications to the svn:externals property when updating the working copy.

The revision graph attempts to show a clearer picture of your repository structure by distinguishing between trunk, branches and tags. As there is no such classification built into Subversion, this information is extracted from the path names. The default settings assume that you use the conventional English names as suggested in the Subversion documentation, but of course your usage may vary.

Specify the patterns used to recognise these paths in the three boxes provided. The patterns will be matched case-insensitively, but you must specify them in lower case. Wild cards * and ? will work as usual, and you can use ; to separate multiple patterns. Do not include any extra white space as it will be included in the matching specification.

	Commit tag detection
	Please note that these patterns are also used to detect commits to a tag, not just for the revision graph.

Colors are used in the revision graph to indicate the node type, i.e. whether a node is added, deleted, renamed. In order to help pick out node classifications, you can allow the revision graph to blend colors to give an indication of both node type and classification. If the box is checked, blending is used. If the box is unchecked, color is used to indicate node type only. Use the color selection dialog to allocate the specific colors used.

Caches all status information in a separate process (TSVNCache.exe). That process watches all drives for changes and fetches the status again if files inside a working copy get modified. The process runs with the least possible priority so other programs don't get hogged because of it. That also means that the status information is not real time but it can take a few seconds for the overlays to change.

Advantage: the overlays show the status recursively, i.e. if a file deep inside a working copy is modified, all folders up to the working copy root will also show the modified overlay. And since the process can send notifications to the shell, the overlays on the left tree view usually change too.

Disadvantage: the process runs constantly, even if you're not working on your projects. It also uses around 10-50 MB of RAM depending on number and size of your working copies.

Caching is done directly inside the shell extension dll, but only for the currently visible folder. Each time you navigate to another folder, the status information is fetched again.

Advantage: needs only very little memory (around 1 MB of RAM) and can show the status in real time.

Disadvantage: Since only one folder is cached, the overlays don't show the status recursively. For big working copies, it can take more time to show a folder in explorer than with the default cache. Also the mime-type column is not available.

With this setting, the TortoiseSVN does not fetch the status at all in Explorer. Because of that, files don't get an overlay and folders only get a 'normal' overlay if they're versioned. No other overlays are shown, and no extra columns are available either.

Advantage: uses absolutely no additional memory and does not slow down the Explorer at all while browsing.

Disadvantage: Status information of files and folders is not shown in Explorer. To see if your working copies are modified, you have to use the “Check for modifications” dialog.

Whenever you checkout a working copy, merge changes or use the repository browser, TortoiseSVN keeps a record of recently used URLs and offers them in a combo box. Sometimes that list gets cluttered with outdated URLs so it is useful to flush it out periodically.

If you want to remove a single item from one of the combo boxes you can do that in-place. Just click on the arrow to drop the combo box down, move the mouse over the item you want to remove and type Shift+Del.

TortoiseSVN stores recent commit log messages that you enter. These are stored per repository, so if you access many repositories this list can grow quite large.

TortoiseSVN caches log messages fetched by the Show Log dialog to save time when you next show the log. If someone else edits a log message and you already have that message cached, you will not see the change until you clear the cache. Log message caching is enabled on the Log Cache tab.

Many dialogs remember the size and screen position that you last used.

When you authenticate with a Subversion server, the username and password are cached locally so you don't have to keep entering them. You may want to clear this for security reasons, or because you want to access the repository under a different username ... does John know you are using his PC?

If you want to clear authentication data for one particular server only, use the Clear... instead of the Clear all button.

TortoiseSVN keeps a log of everything written to its progress dialogs. This can be useful when, for example, you want to check what happened in a recent update command.

The log file is limited in length and when it grows too big the oldest content is discarded. By default 4000 lines are kept, but you can customize that number.

From here you can view the log file content, and also clear it.

Enables log caching whenever log data is requested. If checked, data will be retrieved from the cache when available, and any messages not in the cache will be retrieved from the server and added to the cache.

If caching is disabled, data will always be retrieved directly from the server and not stored locally.

Occasionally you may have to connect to a server which uses the same URL for all repositories. Older versions of svnbridge would do this. If you need to access such repositories you will have to check this option. If you don't, leave it unchecked to improve performance.

Some hosting services give all their repositories the same UUID. You may even have done this yourself by copying a repository folder to create a new one. For all sorts of reasons this is a bad idea - a UUID should be unique. However, the log cache will still work in this situation if you check this box. If you don't need it, leave it unchecked to improve performance.

If you are working offline, or if the repository server is down, the log cache can still be used to supply log messages already held in the cache. Of course the cache may not be up-to-date, so there are options to allow you to select whether this feature should be used.

When log data is being taken from the cache without contacting the server, the dialog using those message will show the offline state in its title bar.

When you invoke the log dialog you will normally want to contact the server to check for any newer log messages. If the timeout set here is non-zero then the server will only be contacted when the timeout has elapsed since the last time contact. This can reduce server round-trips if you open the log dialog frequently and the server is slow, but the data shown may not be completely up-to-date. If you want to use this feature we suggest using a value of 300 (5 minutes) as a compromise.

If you browse around a lot of repositories you will accumulate a lot of log caches. If you're not actively using them, the cache will not grow very big, so TortoiseSVN purges them after a set time by default. Use this item to control cache purging.

Larger caches are more expensive to reacquire, so TortoiseSVN only purges small caches. Fine tune the threshold with this value.

Occasionally something goes wrong with the caching and causes a crash. If this happens the cache is normally deleted automatically to prevent a recurrence of the problem. If you use the less stable nightly build you may opt to keep the cache anyway.

Called before the commit dialog is shown. You might want to use this if the hook modifies a versioned file and affects the list of files that need to be committed and/or commit message. However you should note that because the hook is called at an early stage, the full list of objects selected for commit is not available.

If this is specified, the commit dialog shows a button Run Hook which when clicked runs the specified hook script. The hook script receives a list of all checkec files and folders and the commit message if there was one entered.

Called after the user clicks OK in the commit dialog, and before the commit dialog closes. This hook gets a list of all the checked files. If the hook returns an error, the commit dialog stays open.

If the returned error message contains paths on newline separated lines, those paths will get selected in the commit dialog after the error message is shown.

Called after the user clicks OK in the commit dialog, and before the actual commit begins. This hook has a list of exactly what will be committed.

Called after the commit finishes (whether successful or not).

Called before the update-to-revision dialog is shown.

Called before the actual Subversion update or switch begins.

Called after the update, switch or checkout finishes (whether successful or not).

Called before an attempt to contact the repository. Called at most once in five minutes.

PATH MESSAGEFILE CWD

PATH MESSAGEFILE CWD

PATH DEPTH MESSAGEFILE CWD

PATH DEPTH MESSAGEFILE REVISION ERROR CWD

PATH CWD

PATH DEPTH REVISION CWD

PATH DEPTH REVISION ERROR CWD RESULTPATH

no parameters are passed to this script. You can pass a custom parameter by appending it to the script path.

A path to a temporary file which contains all the paths for which the operation was started. Each path is on a separate line in the temp file.

Note that for operations done remotely, e.g. in the repository browser, those paths are not local paths but the urls of the affected items.

The depth with which the commit/update is done.

Possible values are:

Path to a file containing the log message for the commit. The file contains the text in UTF-8 encoding. After successful execution of the start-commit hook, the log message is read back, giving the hook a chance to modify it.

The repository revision to which the update should be done or after a commit completes.

Path to a file containing the error message. If there was no error, the file will be empty.

The current working directory with which the script is run. This is set to the common root directory of all affected paths.

A path to a temporary file which contains all the paths which were somehow touched by the operation. Each path is on a separate line in the temp file.

TortoiseBlame can use the background colour to indicate the age of lines in a file. You set the endpoints by specifying the colours for the newest and oldest revisions, and TortoiseBlame uses a linear interpolation between these colours according to the repository revision indicated for each line.

You can specify different colours to use for the locator bar. The default is to use strong contrast on the locator bar while keeping the main window background light so that you can still read the text.

You can select the font used to display the text, and the point size to use. This applies both to the file content, and to the author and revision information shown in the left pane.

Defines how many spaces to use for expansion when a tab character is found in the file content.

The default colors used by TortoiseUDiff are usually ok, but you can configure them here.

You can select the font used to display the text, and the point size to use.

Defines how many spaces to use for expansion when a tab character is found in the file diff.

Sometimes multiple users use the same account on the same computer. In such situations it's not really wanted to save the authentication data. Setting this value to false disables the save authentication button in the authentication dialog.

If an update adds a new file from the repository which already exists in the local working copy as an unversioned file, the default action is to keep the local file, showing it as a (possibly) modified version of the new file from the repository. If you would prefer TortoiseSVN to create a conflict in such situations, set this value to false.

As with the explorer, TortoiseSVN shows additional commands if the Shift key is pressed while the context menu is opened. To force TortoiseSVN to always show those extended commands, set this value to true.

The minimum amount of chars from which the editor shows an auto-completion popup. The default value is 3.

The auto-completion list shown in the commit message editor displays the names of files listed for commit. To also include these names with extensions removed, set this value to true.

File externals that are pegged to a specific revision are blocked by default from being selected for a commit. This is because a subsequent update would revert those changes again unless the pegged revision of the external is adjusted.

Set this value to false in case you still want to commit changes to such external files.

If you don't want the explorer to update the status overlays while another TortoiseSVN command is running (e.g. Update, Commit, ...) then set this value to true.

To add a cache tray icon for the TSVNCache program, set this value to true. This is really only useful for developers as it allows you to terminate the program gracefully.

The extra columns the TortoiseSVN adds to the details view in Windows Explorer are normally only active in a working copy. If you want those to be accessible everywhere, not just in working copies, set this value to true. Note that the extra columns are only available in XP. Vista and later doesn't support that feature any more. However some third-party explorer replacements do support those even on Windows versions later than XP.

You can specify a different location for the Subversion configuration file here. This will affect all TortoiseSVN operations.

In most dialogs in TortoiseSVN, you can use Ctrl+Enter to dismiss the dialog as if you clicked on the OK button. If you don't want this, set this value to false.

Set this to true if you want a dialog to pop up for every command showing the command line used to start TortoiseProc.exe.

Set this to true if you want TortoiseSVN to print out debug messages during execution. The messages can be captured with special debugging tools only.

The default format (value of 0) of dialog titles is url/path - name of dialog - TortoiseSVN. If you set this value to 1, the format changes to name of dialog - url/path - TortoiseSVN.

TortoiseSVN allows you to assign an external diff viewer. Most such viewers, however, are not suited for change blaming (Section 4.23.2, “Blame Differences”), so you might wish to fall back to TortoiseMerge in this case. To do so, set this value to true.

This value specifies the number of pixels a dialog has to be near a border before the dialog sticks to it. The default value is 3. To disable this value set the value to zero.

Some apps change the case of filenames without notice but those changes aren't really necessary nor wanted. For example a change from file.txt to FILE.TXT wouldn't bother normal Windows applications, but Subversion is case sensitive in these situations. So TortoiseSVN automatically fixes such case changes.

If you don't want TortoiseSVN to automatically fix such case changes for you, you can set this value to false.

The status list control which is used in various dialogs (e.g., commit, check-for-modifications, add, revert, ...) uses full row selection (i.e., if you select an entry, the full row is selected, not just the first column). This is fine, but the selected row then also covers the background image on the bottom right, which can look ugly. To disable full row select, set this value to false.

This option determines how the Win7 taskbar icons of the various TortoiseSVN dialogs and windows are grouped together. This option has no effect on Vista!

If this is set to false, then every svn:externals is shown during an update separately.

If it is set to true (the default), then update information for externals is only shown if the externals are affected by the update, i.e. changed in some way. Otherwise nothing is shown as with normal files and folders.

This has no effect if the option GroupTaskbarIconsPerRepo is set to 0 (see above).

If this option is set to true, then every icon on the Win7 taskbar shows a small colored rectangle overlay, indicating the repository the dialogs/windows are used for.

Figure 4.95. Taskbar grouping with repository color overlays

By default, TortoiseSVN always runs an update with externals included. This avoids problems with inconsistent working copies. If you have however a lot of externals set, an update can take quite a while. Set this value to false to run the default update with externals excluded. To update with externals included, either run the Update to revision... dialog or set this value to true again.

When the log dialog is started from the merge wizard, already merged revisions are shown in gray, but revisions beyond the point where the branch was created are also shown. These revisions are shown in black because those can't be merged.

If this option is set to true then TortoiseSVN tries to find the revision where the branch was created from and hide all the revisions that are beyond that revision. Since this can take quite a while, this option is disabled by default. Also this option doesn't work with some SVN servers (e.g., Google Code Hosting, see issue #5471 ).

A format string for the log messages when multiple revisions are selected in the log dialog.

You can use the following placeholders in your format string:

The log dialog shows the revision the working copy path is at in bold. But this requires that the log dialog fetches the status of that path. Since for very big working copies this can take a while, you can set this value to false to deactivate this feature.

When you merge revisions from another branch, and merge tracking information is available, the log messages from the revisions you merge will be collected to make up a commit log message. A pre-defined string is used to separate the individual log messages of the merged revisions. If you prefer, you can set this to a value containing a separator string of your choice.

If you want to show the diff at once for more items than specified with this settings, a warning dialog is shown first. The default is 10.

TortoiseSVN checks whether there's a new version available about once a week. If an updated version is found, the commit dialog shows a link control with that info. If you prefer the old behavior back where a dialog pops up notifying you about the update, set this value to true.

The repository browser tries to fetch the web page that's generated by an SVN server configured with the SVNParentPath directive to get a list of all repositories. To disable that behavior, set this value to false.

This option enables the use of Direct2D accelerated drawing in the Scintilla control which is used as the edit box in e.g. the commit dialog, and also for the unified diff viewer. With some graphic cards however this sometimes doesn't work properly so that the cursor to enter text isn't always visible. If that happens, you can turn this feature off by setting this value to false.

If you don't want TortoiseSVN to ask you to update the working copy automatically after an Out of date error, set this value to false.

TortoiseSVN uses accelerators for its explorer context menu entries. Since this can lead to doubled accelerators (e.g. the SVN Commit has the Alt-C accelerator, but so does the Copy entry of explorer). If you don't want or need the accelerators of the TortoiseSVN entries, set this value to false.

This can be useful if you use something other than the windows explorer or if you get problems with the context menu displaying incorrectly. Set this value to false if you don't want TortoiseSVN to show icons for the shell context menu items. Set this value to true to show the icons again.

If you don't want TortoiseSVN to show icons for the context menus in its own dialogs, set this value to false.

The commit and log dialog use styling (e.g. bold, italic) in commit messages (see Section 4.4.5, “Commit Log Messages” for details). If you don't want to do this, set the value to false.

This value contains the URL from which TortoiseSVN tries to download a text file to find out if there are updates available. This might be useful for company admins who don't want their users to update TortoiseSVN until they approve it.

TortoiseSVN checks whether there's a new version available about once a week. If you don't want TortoiseSVN to do this check, set this value to false.