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Essential Eclipse Plugins: Source Control

Source Control or Version Control management tools are a reality of modern development, playing an essential role in helping teams collaborate and helping projects track code-base changes over time.

As I have moved from one team or organization to another, I have met different Source Control tools.

Whichever one you work with, there is probably an Eclipse plugin for it. Many are good enough that for day-to-day dev work you will never need to use the command line, saving those interactions for the rarer, more administratively difficult tasks.

The essential thing is to have a plugin for those day-to-day dev activities, but which one depends on your team's tool. I will touch on some of the best ones here.


Git is the current market leader for Source Control tools. See this link for one assessment of source control market share: https://rhodecode.com/insights/version-control-systems-2016 (I suspect that Git is not as far ahead as some charts suggest; those based on questions asked on help forums may be skewed high by Git's complexity, leading to more questions. Certainly I used the forums far more for Git-projects than for others!)

For Git, the excellent EGit plugin gives all you will need for day-to-day work. Branching, merging, committing, pulling and pushing, and more are readily available from the Git Repository view and context menus. The Interactive Rebase tool is also a great convenience. Highly recommended!

The next most popular source control tool is Subversion. The Eclipse Marketplace has two leading plugins for SVN. The one I am most familiar with is Subclipse. It integrates well with both Eclipse and SVN. It also optionally integrates with the Mylyn tool in Eclipse, and provides a Revision graph feature.

For all that I like Subclipse, though, the Subversive plugin is as or more popular on the Marketplace, and has been highly recommended to me. Since I have no personal experience with it, I will link to it but cannot offer any firsthand observations.

Summary:
How often I use it: daily
Usefulness: high
Star-rating (1-5): na
Download EGit: http://www.eclipse.org/egit/
Download Subclipse: http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/subclipse
Download Subversive: http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/subversive-svn-team-provider

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