It has helped productivity and I have increased my understanding of CVS generally from using it...
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The SmartCVS project window gives you a very good overview over the whole project. With a single look you can see which files have been modified and for what files new revisions exist in the repository. This helps to detect potential conflicts before they occur.
You can filter the displayed files either by file type (e.g. hide unchanged files) or by file name (e.g. show only *.java files). The table sorting and column ordering can be customized to your needs. To search a file just start typing its name.
The Remote State feature does not just show changes of your project files in the repository, but also indicates files which were added from other team members. Thus you can fetch them selectively as you like.
When working on a project, often different tasks need to be done at the same time, e.g., implement feature in files X, fix bug in file Y and correct typo in file Z. This causes your project to contain modified files from different tasks.
Change Sets allow you to organize these files into groups of related changes. Committing your changes in task-oriented portions helps your team to better understand them when checking the log. You can also use the Change Report to review your changes and organize them into Change Sets.
With SmartCVS you don't need to install an external file compare tool, because it already provides a powerful, built-in file compare. You can easily revert back individual changes or edit the files directly. Change markers let you quickly navigate to the changes.
The Change Report combines multiple file comparisons in one window which has been optimized for an easy navigation between changes in different files. It displays a set of changed files and helps you to find out, what exactly has been changed.
The Change Report is the perfect tool to organize your local changes in Change Sets.
SmartCVS lets you easily review the last changes (transactions) of your team. You may search them by the commit message or author, you can see all changed files, you can review the changes in detail and much more.
The Log window displays the revision history of the file.
The time-based layout makes it easy to understand the chronological order, especially for changes in different branches. You can see revision tags or compare revisions with each other.
The Tag Browser does not just list all known tags and branches in the repository, it also shows the branch structure.
Of course, using speed-search finds the wanted tags or branches within a few keystrokes.
The annotated file window displays the file content colored by different means, so you easily can see what lines are new or which person has committed them.
You want to check out a sub-project from a large repository, but do not know the exact name?
Just browse the repository like a normal file system and select the directory you want to check out.