Setup

Source this svn-color.sh from your .bashrc. Something like:

. ~/svn-color/svn-color.sh

What is this

The script decorates the output of most svn commands with terminal colors. Performing the setup above (and restarting bash) will cause svn executed from the bash environment to be executed through this svn-color.py script in here. Colored commands include diff, and 'status'-like commands, such as status, update, etc. The colors were chosen with dark backgrounds in mind.

Additionally, this script omits output that I consider boring, such as:

• mentioning external items that don't change
• reporting the revision number after doing an update

If an external item does change, the Performing status on external item... or Updating external item into... header is preserved.

This project was inspired by https://github.com/jmlacroix/svn-color by Jean-Michel Lacroix.

Limitations

This script produces color, even if stdout is not a tty (so that you can pipe the output through less -RXF).

Using an external editor, such as for svn ci with no -m, is tricky. Since this script pipes svn's stdout, any external editor would also have to go through the pipe, which causes vim and others to behave erroneously. If you want to use an external editor, explicitly ask svn for it, and this program will stay out of your way completely. Specifying either of --editor-cmd $EDITOR or --accept edit will cause this script to allow an external editor and stay out of your way. Otherwise, this script will put --non-interactive on the command line, so svn will not try to open any external editor.

If for any reason you want the old svn behavior, you can use `which svn` instead of svn. Keep in mind that this is just a bash alias, so svn from outside your bash environment will be unmodified.

Examples of omitting boring things

Before:

$ svn st
X       external_item

Performing status on external item at 'external_item':

After:

$ svn st

Before:

$ svn st
X       external_item

Performing status on external item at 'external_item':
?       external_item/new_file

After:

$ svn st
Performing status on external item at 'external_item':
?       external_item/new_file

Before:

$ svn up
Updating '.':

Fetching external item into 'external_item':
External at revision 1234.

At revision 5678.

After:

$ svn up

Before:

$ svn up
Updating '.':

Fetching external item into 'external_item':
U       external_item/new_file
External at revision 1234.

At revision 5678.

After:

$ svn up
Fetching external item into 'external_item':
U       external_item/new_file