What is TortoiseCVS?

TortoiseCVS lets you work with files under CVS version control directly from Windows Explorer. It is 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.

TortoiseCVS at work

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.

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 SourceForge Project of the Month in December 2004.

TortoiseCVS is officially recommended by SourceForge.