SVN Merge Tool

I am currently working on a project that has had a fair amount of development that was done on a branch to support current production while there was some major refactoring and new functionality being added to head.  While working independently on each branch, all was fine.  So, now i got stuck with doing the merge.  Not exactly fun.

I have been using TortoiseSVN’s built in merge tool and was doing pretty good with it.  I am not sure that I think it (I assume SVN itself) does as good of a job merging as I thought CVS did, seems like I have a lot of conflicts that I wonder why were conflicts.  That said, I got to the point where the merge comparisons were not lining up right and making things very difficult to decide what should be done. 

So, I began to search for replacements.  I tried 2, but have stuck with one that I think works fairly well.  It is the Perforce Visual Merge Tool.  While Perforce is not free, the merge tool is.  It was easy to setup with TortoiseSVN too:

For ease, here is the command:

C:\Apps\Perforce\P4Merge.exe %base %theirs %mine %merged

(change to match your install path as needed).

Here is a screenshot of one of my merges:

Sharing keyboard and mouse between 2 computers

My “regular” machine is a laptop and has been for many years now.  The flexibility of being able to move around for meetings, design sessions and being able to close up and continue at home make that the best choice for me.  That said, both at the office and at home, I have another desktop computer that I can use to do different things.  At home, it has my video processing stuff installed on it, at the office it is just there for email, browsing, etc when my laptop is busy or off.  While it took me awhile to move to dual monitors for my primary machine, I adopted being able to use both computers at once a long time ago.  Until today, I only knew of one piece of software that did this, Synergy.  I have really like it for the most part.  It seemed to have hiccups every once in awhile, but restarting it was not too bad and not an every day occurrence.  After Vista came out, the biggest problem was that I could not have it startup automatically like I had on XP.  The project is open source and has not been updated in awhile, so I wasn’t anticipating that this would be something addressed soon and while trying to complete my setup of my laptop with Windows 7, thought I would google to see if there was something else.  There is, Input Director.  I installed this on both machines here at the office in a matter of a couple of minutes and got things up and running.  Seems to work good so far.  And it looks like it will address my issue with being able to start at startup.

Here is a screenshot of setting up the master and the hosts.  You can drag the computers around to show where they are in relation to your master.  This is much nicer than Synergy.