TortoiseCVS lets you work with files under CVS version control directly from Windows Explorer. It’s freely available under the GPL. With TortoiseCVS you can directly check out modules, update, commit and see differences by right clicking on files and folders within Explorer. You can see the state of a file with overlays on top of the normal icons within Explorer. It even works from within the file open dialog. You can perform tagging, branching, merging and importing, and you can go directly to a browser web log (using ViewCVS or CVSWeb) on a particular file. If you want to work with an existing repository, download TortoiseCVS and read the User’s Guide. To create your own local repository to work alone on, read this FAQ entry. If you want to set up a new shared repository, you will need a CVS server. We recommend CVSNT for both Unix and Windows machines. TortoiseCVS can also be used with original CVS, but some features depend on a CVSNT server. There are some CVS things that you can’t do with TortoiseCVS – have a look at the feature requests database. The GPL license lets you improve TortoiseCVS, as long as you make any changes to the source code available. If you would like to help implement some features, please see the development section. TortoiseCVS was originally based on the source code for WinCVS, a more comprehensive but complex to use client. Many thanks to them!
