Cervisia can be customized in various ways to your needs and preferences. Some options which you may want to change regularly are directly available in the Option menu. Others are united in a common dialog which is available via Option->Settings....
Timeout after which a progress dialog appears. Practically all CVS commands started in a sandbox which belongs to a remote repository need a connection to the CVS server. This is affected by delays from the network connection or a high load on the server. For this reason, for commands like View->Difference to repository... Cervisia opens a dialog which indicates that the command is still running and which allows you to abort it. Furthermore, this dialog is used to show you error messages from CVS. As this dialog may become annoying after some time, it is shown only after a certain timeout which is 4 seconds by default. Here you can change this value.
User name for the ChangeLog editor. Whenever you use the menu item File->Insert ChangeLog entry..., a new ChangeLog entry is generated with the current date and your username. Normally, it is considered good style to insert your full name and your email address into each of your ChangeLog entries. Here you can configure this.
Number of context lines in the diff dialog. For the diff dialog, Cervisia uses the option -U to diff. This lets diff show only a limited number of lines around each difference region. Here you can set the argument to -U.
Additional options for cvs diff. Here you can add additional arguments to the diff. A popular example is -b which lets diff ignore changes in the amount of whitespace.
Start File->Status automatically. When you check this option, the File->Status command is started whenever you open a sandbox. As this command may need some time and also needs a connection to the server for remote repositories (making it unusable for offline usage), you can set this option separately for local and remote repositories.
Editor. Here you can configure which editor is called when a file in the main view is doubleclicked. To execute the editor, the entry made here is concatenated with the file name and given to a shell. So it is acceptable to use programs like gnuclient here. You can also enter the string $EDITOR if your environment variable $EDITOR points to an editor which opens an X11 window itself.