SVN blame in Eclipse

Solution 1:

As was pointed out, you would currently have to first install a plug-in to enable Subversion support. I recommend Subversive, myself, and a search here on Stack Overflow for the tags "eclipse" and "subversion" together will show several previous threads regarding "gotchas" to watch out for when installing the connectors (Subversive is separated into two parts-- the core support and "connectors" that provide the SVN glue).

Once you have that installed, you can configure repositories, create new projects by directly entering a new repository address and checking it out, or associate an existing project that was already attached to SVN with the repository by have Subversion look it over.

Once you've done that, this is how you access the "svn blame" command, also known as "annotate" or "praise":

For a resource, right click on the resource name in the file-explorer pane to pop-up the context menu (you can also get this menu by right-clicking anywhere in the editor itself). Under the "Team" heading (which is also where you access all the SVN commands, as Eclipse generalizes source control under the heading of "Team Sharing"), select "Show Annotation". On my Mac PowerBook, the keyboard shortcut for this is Ctrl + Option + A, I'm not near my Linux or Windows XP platforms to see what the shortcut us on either of them (Mac OS X ports tend to tweak keyboard shortcuts to adhere to the "greater good" view of what a Mac application should do).

After a bit of time conversing with the Subversion repository, the left-gutter of the editor window will show a series of colored bars. If you have line-numbers enabled for your editor, these will overlay the numbers. Otherwise, they'll just be bars. Each alternation of color represents a break where responsibility changes from one user to another. If you hover the pointer over a bar, a tooltip will appear identifying the responsible user, the revision/commit that the lines are from, date and the check-in comment. The color of the bars will vary from committer to committer, and revision to revision. They'll be varying shades of the same base color, but Eclipse will try to make them visually distinct (as much as possible). When you're hovering over a snippet, it highlights slightly, and all other bars that are tied to the same revision will also highlight.

(Now, don't ask me how to turn it off. Thus far, my only solution has been to close the buffer and re-open it!)