CornerStone

Cornerstone is a highly aclaimed, commercial graphical Subversion client. It provides an easy interface to a number of advanced Subversion features. It can be bought from the Cornerstone home page, or from the Mac App Store.

The Cornerstone web site has a good introduction to its main features, and useful online help. What follows below is a short overview of the main features needed in daily use.

Initial setup

Start Cornerstone and either click Add Repository (if you don’t have a local working copy already) or Add Working Copy (if you do have a working copy already):

Cornerstone: initial setup

Working with the local working copy

When all is set up, Cornerstone will give you a status listing directly in the window. It will also indicate how many commits are in the repository since you last updated (1 in the picture below). There are premade filters to list All files, only Changed files, Conflicted files, etc. In addition, there is a search field where one can search on filename, author name or revision number:

Cornerstone: view of working copy

When committing files, press Cmd-Return to get a diff view to help with writing the commit message, and to verify that you are actually committing what you intended:

Cornerstone: commit with text diff

The diff view also works with images:

Cornerstone: commit with image diff

One of the most powerful features of Cornerstone is the timeline view. Using it one can compare any two revisions of a file:

Cornerstone: timeline view

This can be very useful e.g. when debugging, or tracking changes, especially when combined with the blame labelling (turn on the blame labelling by clicking the button highlighted with the red circle below):

Cornerstone: timeline view with blame enabled

There are many more features in Cornerstone, e.g. merging and branching, that go beyond this short guide. Look at the Cornerstone help linked to above, and don’t be afraid of asking for help.