Home / SmartSVN / 14.1 / Preferences

Preferences

The application preferences define the global behavior of SmartSVN, regarding UI, SVN commands, etc. Contrary to the project settings (see Project Settings), these preferences apply to all projects.

Tip

Most preferences are stored in the settings.xml file in SmartSVN’s settings directory. Refer to Installation and Files for details.

The following sections will give details on notable configuration options.

Authentication

The Authentication page shows all credentials which SmartSVN has collected. Credentials can be selectively removed to force SmartSVN requesting new credentials when connecting to the repository again.

All passwords needed to access repositories can optionally be stored in SmartSVN’s password store. This password store is located in the password file, which can be found in SmartSVN’s settings directory (see Installation and Files).

The password store can be protected by a master password, and each time you start SmartSVN, this master password has to be entered as soon as SmartSVN tries to access the password store for the first time. The entered password is kept in memory while the program runs, so you don’t have to enter it again for the rest of the current session. You may choose Don’t use a master password if you don’t want the password store to be protected with a master password. However, this option is only recommended if you can make sure the master password file itself is protected against unauthorized access.

Master Password

By clicking on the Change Master Password button on the Authentication page in the preferences, you can set, reset or change the master password. Use Change master password to change the current password; this will preserve the stored passwords, but requires that you supply the Current Master Password. Note that you don’t need to enter the Current Master Password if you are currently working without a master password.

If you have forgotten the master password, select Set new master password. In that case all previously stored passwords will be discarded. Enter the New Master Password and Retype New Master Password. When leaving both fields blank, you will continue to work without a master password, i.e. as if having selected the option Don’t use a master password when you were asked to set the master password.

SSH

You can either use SmartSVN’s built-in SSH client or your existing System SSH configuration.

System SSH on Windows

Using the System SSH configuration on Windows is known to work well with Putty/Pageant. This requires a tunnel definition in Subversion’s config file, which might look like:

"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\PuTTY\\plink.exe" -v -P 22 -l user

Note that Pageant only works well with private key authentication. For troubleshooting purposes, it can sometimes be useful to temporarily switch to password authentication. In this case, the password has to be specified as part of the tunnel configuration:

"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\PuTTY\\plink.exe" -v -P 22 -l user -pw passwd

When using such a configuration, only use test passwords and only store the password temporarily!

URL Aliases

You can configure aliases for frequently used URLs. These aliases can be used in all input fields where SmartSVN expects an URL. You can also append a path to an alias.

Example

When having alias subversion configured as http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion, you can use subversion/trunk instead of http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk.

User Interface

With the option Use background color in file table to indicate certain states you can control whether the file table on the Project Window may change its background color to indicate certain table states. For example, the table may take on a yellow background to indicate that it currently doesn’t show the files it would show ‘normally’, but the files that match the filter pattern entered into the filter text field on the top right of the file table.

For File Name Matches you can configure the filename search and filter features in SmartSVN:

  • Exact case Requires the search pattern and file name to match in case.
  • Ignore case Ignores the case for matching search pattern and file name.
  • Smart upper case Lower case characters in the search pattern can match upper- and lower-case characters in the file name. But upper-case characters in the search pattern match only upper-case characters in the file name. Examples: SMF will match SuMainFrame, but not SuMainContentFrame. fileS will match FileSignature, but not Files.

Tools

The configured external tools will be present in the Tools menu of the project window and in files’ and directories’ context menus.

A tool is defined by the operating system Command to be executed and its Arguments. Following variables will be substituted when used as parts of Arguments:

  • ${filePath}: the file’s or directorie’s absolute path (including name)
  • ${fileUri}: the file’s or directorie’s URI
  • ${encoding}: the file’s encoding, derived from svn:mime-type and svn:charset

Alternatively, if the tool can be invoked on a multi-selection, ${selectionFile} will be substituted by the path of a temporary file which contains the paths of all selected files. If ${selectionFile} has been specified, ${filePath}, ${fileUri} and ${encoding} will not be populated.

A tool has a Menu Item Name and an optional Accelerator. You can link a specific Pattern to an external tool and specify whether it Handles only Files, only Directories or Both of them. Depending on this configuration it will be present/available on files and/or directories.

When selecting Can be used by the Open command, it will be invoked on Open if the name of the selected file (or directory) is matching the specified Pattern.

If ${filePath} is used, the working directory of the external tool will be the file’s parent directory, otherwise the working directory will be the current working directory of SmartSVN.