Annotations View

Sometimes you need to know not only what was changed in a file, but also who made those changes. The Annotations view displays the revision and the author that changed every line in a file. The annotations of a file are computed and this view is opened with the Show Annotation action, which is available in the History menu, and from the contextual menu of the following views: the Repositories view, Working copy view, History view, and Directory Change Set view..

This action opens a dialog box that allows you to configure some options for showing the annotations.

Figure: Show Annotation Options Dialog Box

Once you have configured the options and click OK, the Annotations view is displayed (by default, on the right side of the application). You can click a line in the editor panel where the file is opened to see the revision in which the line was last modified. The same revision is highlighted in the History view and you can also see all the lines that were changed in the same revision highlighted in the editor panel. Also, the entries of the Annotations view corresponding to that revision are highlighted. Therefore, the Annotations view, History view, and annotations editor panel are all synchronized. Clicking a line in one of them highlights the corresponding lines in the other two.

Figure: Annotations View

The following options can be configured in the Show Annotation dialog box:
From Revision Section
Select the revision from which to start computing the annotation. If you press the History button, the History dialog box is displayed, which allows you to select a revision.
To Revision Section
Select the ending revision by choosing between the HEAD revision or specify it in the Other text box . If you press the History button, the History dialog box is displayed, which allows you to select a revision.
Encoding
Select the encoding to be used when the annotation is computed. For each line of text, the SVN Client looks through the history of the file to be annotated see when it was last modified, and by whom. It is required that it is in the form of a text file. Therefore, encoding is needed to properly decode and read the file content. By default, the encoding of the operating system is used.
Ignore MIME type
If enabled, the file is treated as a text file and ignores what the SVN system infers from the svn:mime-type property.
Ignore line endings
If enabled, the differences in line endings are ignored when the annotation is computed.
Ignore whitespaces
If enabled, it allows you to specify how the whitespace changes should be handled. When enabled, you can then choose between two options:
  • Ignore whitespace changes - Ignores changes in the amount of whitespaces or to their type (for example, when changing the indentation or changing tabs to spaces).
    Note: Whitespaces that were added where there were none before, or that were removed, are still considered to be changes.
  • Ignore all whitespaces - Ignores all types of whitespace changes.
Tip: Enabling any of these ignore options can help you better determine the last time a meaningful change was made to a given line of text.
After you configure the options and press OK, the annotations will be computed and the Annotations view is displayed, where all the users that modified the selected resource will be presented, along with the specific lines and revision numbers modified by each user.
Note: If the file has a very long history, the computation of the annotation data can take a long time to process.