FAQ

Why not just use git, or git-svn?

If you can move to git, move to git. Plenty of people cannot: the repository, the release process and the audit trail are organisational decisions that sit well above any one developer’s preference. git-svn bridges the two, but it asks you to keep a second history in step with the first and to translate between two models every time something goes wrong.

revision takes the other road. SVN stays the source of truth, and the day-to-day work over it gets a proper interface instead. A tool that only has to speak one language can speak it plainly — a changelist is a changelist here, not a stand-in for something else — and, frankly, it looks better doing it.

Is SVN dead?

No. Apache shipped Subversion 1.15.0-rc3 on 20 July 2026 — the project is still cutting releases in the open. Large centralised codebases, with per-path access control and decades of history behind them, have not gone anywhere either, and the tooling around them has to keep up.

Does this replace the svn binary?

No — it drives it. Every action shells out to the svn already on your PATH and reads what comes back; nothing about the working copy format is reimplemented underneath. Your ~/.subversion/config, your cached credentials, your hooks and your server behave exactly as they do on the command line. Remove revision and the working copy is untouched — which also means anything it did can be undone with svn directly.

Is it safe? Does it cache anything behind my back?

Every command it runs is listed in the Command Log panel as it happens, with its full argument list, its exit code and its output. Nothing runs that you cannot read.

There is no shadow copy of the working copy and no index of its own — state lives in SVN, and revision re-reads it. The only files it owns are under ~/.config/revision/: your settings and a note of when it last checked for a release. Diffs reach the disk only when you ask for one, where you ask for it. An svn+ssh passphrase is handed to ssh-add through the environment and is never written down.

Is there a Windows build?

Not today, and it is not a focus. Windows already has SVN clients that a terminal UI will not beat on their own ground — TortoiseSVN puts the whole thing in Explorer, with more than this can offer. Prebuilt binaries cover macOS and Linux; see Requirements.

Nothing rules it out, though. If you want it, say so on the issue tracker.

Why is it called revision and not lazysvn?

While lazysvn is an obvious choice (given the inspiration), this is just to avoid being overly derivative.