Visualize your development

The Distributed Branch Explorer

The Branch Explorer draws the evolution of your code base, just as you would draw it on a whiteboard. Branches and their relationships are displayed along a timeline. You can zoom the display, color-code branches according to user-defined criteria, and suppress the display of branches that you're not currently interested in.

Using the task-driven development model makes the Branch Explorer display particularly straightforward and easy to understand.

In Plastic SCM 4.0, the Branch Explorer is more distributed than ever, being fully aware of the remote repositories you work with and letting you explore them as if they were local, even drawing their changes together with the local ones in the diagram.

Code comparison and code review

Plastic SCM goes beyond showing the changes to individual files. The SuperDiff window can show all the changes made in a changeset, all the changes made on a task branch, or all the differences between two labeled baselines of the code base.

Going even further, the Code Review window enables line-by-line commenting of a SuperDiff display. Thus, your team can perform peer reviews, an SCM best practice, within the Plastic SCM GUI -- no third-party tool required!

Diff and merge tools

Plastic SCM's graphical diff and merge tools make it easy to see the changes made to source-code files and other text files. These tools also show directory-level changes: renamings, moves, and deletions of files and subdirectories.

You can compare revisions of image files, too -- either side-by-side or by blending them together.

With their Xdiff and Xmerge capabilities ("cross-difference, "cross-merge") these tools can identify fragments of code that have been moved, visually linking them for easy navigation. They identify similar fragments of code (within a user-settable threshold) so that even if a code block was both moved and changed, it's recognized as the same block. Read more...

Annotating revisions

The Annotate command shows which user changed which lines in a source-code file. (Some other SCM systems call this feature "blame".) It can also display the task associated with the change, making it easy to determine the reason for the change.