Rabbitvcs vs Tortoise SVN

Posted under » Version Control on 20 June 2026

I like Tortoise SVN because of the GUI. Tortoise SVN is made by Stefan (a German dude?) and he regularly updated it and has made SVN popular. It is made using C++ for windows and no equivalent in linux. So I finally tried RabbitVCS which is made using Python. I was kinda sceptical at first because the latest version 0.19 was released on Jul 19, 2023. The documentation was scarce and youtube has very little of it. However it can work with the latest Ubuntu running Nautilus which is built using GTK 4 and that is all that matters.

RabbitVCS was kinda ambitious and versatile because it not only support SVN but also GIT and Mercurial! It uses MELD, one of the best open-source diff tool. To install (in Ubuntu),

$ apt update
$ apt-get install python3-configobj python3-gtkspellcheck python3-svn subversion python3-dulwich python3-pygments git meld python3-tk
$ apt-get install rabbitvcs-nautilus rabbitvcs-cli

As you can see from the above, there are many things being installed. For RabbitVCS to work with Nautilus, you need to restart your PC. Because it works with Nautilus you can svn up etc. with Nautilus just like Tortoise with the explorer.

When I ran it, you can see some similarities with Tortoise. However, RabbitVCS is not as good. For example,

when at log you can't search the log messages and filter it
you can't copy the path and name of the file

To overcome this, you can use the SVN client command line to view the logs.

$ svn log -r 8:19
$ svn log -r 60 -v
$ svn log display/index.html

The plus is when you use Meld, and do merge you will save the file at the /tmp folder like so /tmp/rabbitvcs-4a1f48b042/rabbitvcs-1-66-index.html