At the moment, I’m just starting to dig into one of the larger web projects I’ve done, migrating a large, data-driven site from PHP4 to PHP5, moving it from a commercial host to my own hosting, and rewriting large swaths of code—all at once.  The previous webmaster, who wrote the original code, said he’d used subversion to deal with making revisions and having the ability to roll back when things broke, so I decided to look into subversion.

While most of the documentation made it seem really complex, once I’d settled on https access (apache mod_dav_svn), in the context of an existing SSL site I had, things were very easy–just a few svnadmin commands to set up the directories and a few lines of tweaking in an apache config file.  About 10 minutes into playing with the repository, having imported the existing site and set up a working copy on my local machine, I wondered if there weren’t some nice GUI way to deal with checkout/checkin/status/etc.  Enter svnX.

Now I’ve got working copies on my desktop and laptop as well as a copy checked out to the new production server and I can easily edit locally, even searching all files (that makes it a lot easier to fix all the instances of some incompatibility with PHP5 or some assumption about the directory structure or other oddity).  Once I’ve edited, I can easily check what’s been revised (status) and save the changes to the repository (checkin/commit) using svnX.  A quick “svn up” on the server and everything’s live.

This setup is so wonderfully easy that I’m annoyed I didn’t know to do it sooner.

Why do I want all these different facets?  Well, much as I hate to use it, damn near everyone in “the business world” uses Microsoft Office, and the Mac versions suck (I don’t know about 2008, but I’m not optimistic) and I’d rather use the PC version (2003, since 2007 is a disaster best described as MS openly giving the finger to all its customers).  Graphics work and page layout are in various Adobe Creative Suite products under OS X (I suppose that there exist PC versions, but really, who does graphics work on a PC?).  I also prefer web and email on the Mac side.  Then, when I have to deal with network/server/etc. stuff, I dive into terminal and I’m off.  For actual programming, while I love using WinSCP + TextPad under Windows, LOVE it, I tend more toward Transmit + Komodo Edit nowadays (this is largely a side effect of having a huge project hosted on a server that only supports FTP, not SFTP, and for whatever reason, WinSCP can’t seem to maintain a stable FTP connection with that server, so editing led to all sorts of nasty corruption and whatnot when the connection would drop mid-edit).

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that my day job is in an all-Mac office.