When you mark a file in the main view and choose Browse log from the View menu, a
cvs log filenames |
command is issued and a dialog is shown which reflects the version history of the marked file.
You can choose to see the history as a tree or in list form. What you prefer is of course a matter of taste and it depends on what information you are interested in. The tree is an intuitive representation of what has been done on different branches by which authors. As tooltips, you can see the according log messages. The list is by its nature linear and therefore does not give an immediate view of branches. On the other hand, it concentrates more otherwise relevant information on less screen estate, namely the time of each change of the file and the first part of the log message.
To obtain more information about a certain revision, you can click on it either in the list or the tree view. The fields in the middle of the dialog are then filled with the complete information provided by cvs log. You can mark two revisions, called 'A' and 'B', which are relevant if you make use of further features provided by the push buttons. Revision 'A' can be chosen with the left mouse button, revision 'B' with the middle one. In the list view, you can also navigate with with your cursor keys. In order to mark revisions 'A' and 'B', use the keybindings Ctrl-A, Ctrl-B, resp.
If you press the button Annotate, you get a dialog showing the text of file belonging to the revision marked as 'A'. Every line is prefixed with the information about who edited this last time, and at which revision this happened.
If you press the button Diff, a cvs diff call is issued and you get a dialog in which all the modifications between the two marked revisions are shown. To make it easy to see the changes, different colors are used to mark lines which have been added, removed or simply changed.
