If your working copy is up to date and there are no conflicts, you are ready to commit your changes. Select any file and/or folders you want to commit, then TortoiseSVN → Commit....

Figure 5.8. The Commit dialog

The commit dialog will show you every changed file, including added, deleted and unversioned files. If you don't want a changed file to be committed, just uncheck that file. If you want to include an unversioned file, just check that file to add it to the commit.

Items which have been switched to a different repository path are also indicated using an (s) marker. You may have switched something while working on a branch and forgotten to switch back to trunk. This is your warning sign!

If you have modified files which have been included from a different repository using svn:externals, those changes cannot be included in the same atomic commit. A warning symbol below the file list tells you if this has happened, and the tooltip explains that those external files have to be committed separately.

Double clicking on any modified file in the commit dialog will launch the external diff tool to show your changes. The context menu will give you more options, as shown in the screenshot. You can also drag files from here into another application such as a text editor or an IDE.

You can select or deselect items by clicking on the checkbox to the left of the item. For directories you can use Shift-select to make the action recursive.

The columns displayed in the bottom pane are customizable. If you right click on any column header you will see a context menu allowing you to select which columns are displayed. You can also change column width by using the drag handle which appears when you move the mouse over a column boundary. These customizations are preserved, so you will see the same headings next time.

By default when you commit changes, any locks that you hold on files are released automatically after the commit succeeds. If you want to keep those locks, make sure the Keep locks checkbox is checked. The default state of this checkbox is taken from the no_unlock option in the Subversion configuration file. Read the section called “General Settings” for information on how to edit the Subversion configuration file.

The commit dialog supports Subversion's changelist feature to help with grouping related files together. Find out about this feature in the section called “Change Lists”.

Sometimes you have versioned files that change frequently but that you really don't want to commit. Sometimes this indicates a flaw in your build process - why are those files versioned? should you be using template files? But occasionally it is inevitable. A classic reason is that your IDE changes a timestamp in the project file every time you build. The project file has to be versioned as it includes all the build settings, but it doesn't need to be committed just because the timestamp changed.

To help out in awkward cases like this, we have reserved a changelist called ignore-on-commit. Any file added to this changelist will automatically be unchecked in the commit dialog. You can still commit changes, but you have to select it manually in the commit dialog.

Be sure to enter a log message which describes the changes you are committing. This will help you to see what happened and when, as you browse through the project log messages at a later date. The message can be as long or as brief as you like; many projects have guidelines for what should be included, the language to use, and sometimes even a strict format.

You can apply simple formatting to your log messages using a convention similar to that used within emails. To apply styling to text, use *text* for bold, _text_ for underlining, and ^text^ for italics.

Figure 5.9. The Commit Dialog Spellchecker

TortoiseSVN includes a spellchecker to help you get your log messages right. This will highlight any mis-spelled words. Use the context menu to access the suggested corrections. Of course, it doesn't know every technical term that you do, so correctly spelt words will sometimes show up as errors. But don't worry. You can just add them to your personal dictionary using the context menu.

The log message window also includes a filename and function auto-completion facility. This uses regular expressions to extract class and function names from the (text) files you are committing, as well as the filenames themselves. If a word you are typing matches anything in the list (after you have typed at least 3 characters, or pressed Ctrl+Space), a drop-down appears allowing you to select the full name. The regular expressions supplied with TortoiseSVN are held in the TortoiseSVN installation bin folder. You can also define your own regexes and store them in %APPDATA%\TortoiseSVN\autolist.txt. Of course your private autolist will not be overwritten when you update your installation of TortoiseSVN. If you are unfamiliar with regular expressions, take a look at the introduction at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression , and the online documentation and tutorial at http://www.regular-expressions.info/ .

You can re-use previously entered log messages. Just click on Recent messages to view a list of the last few messages you entered for this working copy. The number of stored messages can be customized in the TortoiseSVN settings dialog.

You can clear all stored commit messages from the Saved data page of TortoiseSVN's settings, or you can clear individual messages from within the Recent messages dialog using the Delete key.

After pressing OK, a dialog appears displaying the progress of the commit.

Figure 5.10. The Progress dialog showing a commit in progress

The progress dialog uses colour coding to highlight different commit actions

This is the default colour scheme, but you can customise those colours using the settings dialog. Read the section called “TortoiseSVN Colour Settings” for more information.