jCVS Advanced Features

This document attempts to briefly introduce some of the more advanced and esoteric features of jCVS.

Making Selections

To select all of the files in a directory, click on the directory's folder icon. Clicking again will deselect all of the files.

To select all of the files in a directory, and recursively select all of the files in all of the directories in the directory, click on the directory's folder icon, while you hold down the 'control' key (Ctl).

Opening and Closing Folders

You can open a folder two ways. You can click on the little triangle rotator to the left of the folder's icon, or you can double click on the folder's name. You can close an open folder in the same way.

Customizing jCVS With Properties

You can customize many aspects of jCVS, including being able to internationalize some of the dialog labels used, via the 'properties.txt' file, or via your home directory jcvsrc file ('.jcvsrc' under UNIX, 'jcvsrc.txt' on other platforms).

Any property in the 'properties.txt' file can be overridden for a specific operating system by appending a period followed by the os name to the property name. Since property names can not contain spaces, any spaces in the os name are replaced by underscores (_). Thus, to override the property named 'jCVS.global.tempDir' for the 'Windows NT' operating system, you would define a property named 'jCVS.global.tempDir.Windows_NT'.

Customizing jCVS Menus And Commands

If you study the 'properties.txt' file for a while, you will notice that almost all of jCVS's menus are defined as properties.

The details of this customization will require more documentation, but here's a quick idea. Property 'jCVS.projectMenuBar' defines a list of colon separated menus.

For each menu in the menubar, there is a property defined with the name 'jCVS.projectMenu.menuname'. This property is a colon separated list of menu items.

For each menu item, there is a property defined with the name 'jCVS.projectMenuItem.menuname.itemname'. This property is a menu item definition.

A menu item definition consists of colon separated fields. The first field is the label for the menu item, which will appear in the menu. The next field will be a command selector. Command selectors can be one of two - CVS and JCVS. A CVS command is followed by a CVS command specifier which specifies a CVS command to be performed on the specified selection.

A JCVS command is a command that is implemented by the jCVS client, as opposed to making a request of the cvs server. There is currently no documentation of jCVS commands, but all available commands are used in the Properties file.

$Id: Advanced.html,v 2.2 1998/08/07 03:21:06 time Exp $
Copyright (c) 1997 By Timothy Gerard Endres
jCVS is licensed to you under the GNU General Public License.