I was introduced to subversion about a month and a half ago, and have generally found it to be wonderful, and a vast improvement over CVS. I won't get into the details, because I'll just sound like every other person out there who has switched to svn and then raved about it, so you can just look up somebody else's blog post on the subject. One thing I did miss, however, was the ability to open diffs in FileMerge.

So finally today, I decided to solve things once and for all, and came up with 20 lines of python that fixes it up very nicely. And now I'll share it with the world!

Put the following code into a file called svnopendiffshim.py that's somewhere in your $PATH:

#!/usr/bin/python2

from sys import argv
from os import execlp
import re


left = "";
right = "";

argv.pop(0)

while argv:
    arg = argv.pop(0)
    if arg == "-u":
        pass
    elif arg == "-L":
        argv.pop(0)
    elif left == "":
        left = arg
    else:
        right = arg

execlp("opendiff", "opendiff", left, right)

Now, add one line to your .profile (if you're using a shell other than bash, you're on your own here):
alias svndiff='svn diff --diff-cmd svnopendiffshim.py'

Now open a new Terminal window, go into a project, and type svndiff somefile.h and, bang, your diff opens in FileMerge.

So there you have it. I hope somebody finds this as useful as I do.

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