SnailSVN: SVN for Finder 4+

So close and yet so far

It’s not a contradiction to say that this app is a dog, while still being the best available Mac equivalent to Windows’ TortoiseSVN.
It works, although the setup is a bit headache-y with manually assigning associations to apps & locations that it already claims to know and/or pack with, and unless you know what settings to tweak where/how, the simple pack-in SVN versions will probably be mildly incompatible with the native XCode SVN install, meaning you can’t easily command-line fix things Snail breaks.
It integrates with Finder and displays a nice visual iconography of file status, but prepare to wait for half an hour at a time as it grinds through (auto-)refreshes on massive project hierarchies on your big archival project platter drive, taking half your CPUs and most of your system RAM with it (and the rare apparent pagefile-filling memory leak when you’ve tried to do too much between refreshes and thrown the whole working copy status into a tailspin).
It makes SVN visual, and thus much more approachable than command-line, but trips over its own feet by not actually offering further refinement of selections when you e.g. click “Add…” and it, rather than honoring the “…” with a followup picker, just adds the entire specified hierarchy whether you want it all or not (with "Committ…”, by contrast, you DO get a followup picker, but it does NOT intelligently preselect modified files, nor does it let you select entire folders by checking the folder itself- you need to manually check every single file, or check “select all” which will select and add/update even unchanged/unmanaged files!).
Overall, I do not regret buying this app- I’d much rather use it than the command line, which I suppose is the point- I am just regularly frustrated by its shortcomings and usability oversights.

Useful but missing one critical feature for me

I had been using Cornerstone to check in and manage system config files with our SVN repos. I had been looking for an alternative for a while and came across SnailSVN. I had used TortiseSVN under Windows years ago and it worked fine for what we needed.

So far I have been very happy with SnailSVN. It is slow, but I expected that, especially given the size of our repos (lots of small config files). I like the integration with the Finder, it makes it very easy to see status of files (up to date, changed, not added yet), and run Commits and Updates.

I would have given it 5 stars but for two issues. One is probably my fault, the other is the way it works. I have not been able to convince it to use my installation of BBEdit for compares (diff). The other issue is that it is NOT maintaining timestamp on checked out files. I rely on the timestamp to know when a config file has changed and whne I need to push a new one out to the server (using Yummy PRO SFTP tool). Unfortunately, all the local copies of the config files are timestamped when I checked them out and not the last time they were modified. Cornerstone was able to maintain modification time, so I know it can be done. I would love to see that as an option in the SnailSVN configuration.

Developer Response ,

Hi PK1048,
To use BBEdit for compare/diff, you need to install the BBEdit command line tools:
https://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/cmd-line-tools.html ;
For the timestamp issue, you can enable the "use-commit-times" option in "~/Library/Containers/net.langui.SnailSVN/Data/.subversion/config".
Thank you!

buggy, poorly designed, and poor support

This app simply does not work like it should. The contextual menus will show up for a while, and then not show up. Restarting the app sometimes fixes it for a while, sometimes not. Committing often generates spurious errors, forcing you to try again. I tried writing to the developers but never got a reply.

I limped along with this for a couple of weeks, but finally I've given up on it. MacPorts will quickly install a command-line svn build for you that works like a champ, so my copy of SnailSVN is now in the trash.