Best Subversion clients for Windows Vista (64bit)

Question

I've been using TortoiseSVN in a Windows environment for quite some time. It seems very feature-complete and nicely integrated into the Windows shell, and more importantly, it's fairly painless to teach to colleagues with little or no experience with source control. However, since we have moved to Windows Vista 64bit, Tortoise has been very buggy and has seemed to cause lots of explorer.exe abnormalities and crashes. This has happened both with older versions of the software and the latest version (1.5.1 build 13563).

I was curious if anyone has suggestions for other Subversion clients that will run on Windows (specifically Vista 64bit). Developers here use a variety of text editors so using Visual Studio or Dreamweaver for SVN is not ideal.

I have heard great things about Cornerstone, and would love something similar for Windows if it exists.

Answer 1

I have been using the 64Bit version of TortoiseSVN for ages and I have never had issues with it on Windows 64Bit or Vista 64Bit. I am currently not aware of any other similiar SVN clients that do work on Vista. Is it possible the problem could lie within the configuration of TortoiseSVN or even the installation of Vista? Is the problem occurring on Vista native or SP 1?

Answer 2

I'll second Diago's answer. I use TortoiseSVN on Vista x64 pretty heavily.

I did upgrade directly from an older version to 1.5.2 though, and never used 1.5.1. Have you tried 1.5.2?

Answer 3

TortoiseSVN in combination with VisualSVN for VS.

Answer 4

TortoiseSVN in combination with VisualSVN for VS.

Answer 5

I too get explorer crashes in Vista (I'm not in the 64Bit version though). I'm using Vista Super Saijen (or whatever they are calling the most expensive version). I'm not having any bugs with Tortoise.

My explorer does, however, crash about every other day (sometimes multiple times a day if it's having an "off" day). I'm not positive it's being caused by TortoiseSVN though. From what I hear, the explorer just crashes a lot in Vista...

Have you tried uninstalling Tortoise and using Windows for a day or two and seeing if it still crashes? Do you restart your computer at least once a day (It seems the longer I go between restarts, the worse the crashes get)?

Answer 6

I've only used TortoiseSVN.

Answer 7

I'm correlating the Vista/explorer problems with Tortoise because they normally occur when I'm using the functionality in Tortoise. Sometimes bringing up the "merge" screen will cause the GUI to start acting very strange and eventually hang or crash.

I did not see 1.5.2 -- I'm installing now, maybe that will fix some of my issues.

Answer 8

I used to have lots of Explorer crashes (on 32-bit) caused by Tortoise. They seem to have gone away since I used the Include/Exclude path settings in the "Icon Overlays" configuration of TSVN. Constraining icon overlays to specific directories where I keep my source made this much more stable.

Answer 9

Tortoise SVN with Ankhsvn for VS 2005

Answer 10

I'll third Diago and Dave's response. I've been using TotoiseSVN on Vista x64 for over 8 months with no problems at all. I'm actually a little behind and still on 1.4.8. (Note to self... upgrade)

Answer 11

Run both 32 and 64 bit clients.... otherwise explorer instances launched from 32bit processes ( including load and save dialogs) will have no Tortoise menus.

Also upgrade to latest 1.5.3 at time of answer.

Answer 12

I have Tortoise installed but rarely use it over SmartSVN. It is a Java-based application and so does not look like a native Windows application, but performs very well. There is a free version with reduced functionality, but the paid-for version is not very expensive ($79) and well worth the money. The biggest benefit I find is a real-time view similar to the "check for modifications" feature in Tortoise, which auto-refreshes every time the UI gets focus. You can easily see what you've changed across your whole source tree. It also has shell integration, although I can't comment on that feature as I haven't installed it because I already had Tortoise installed.