Learning GNU Emacs, Second Edition

Individual VC Commands

We’ve already explained what the main command, vc-next-action, does. Now we’ll describe each of VC’s other commands in detail. We have chosen the order of these descriptions to take you from frequently used and simpler commands to rarer and more complex ones.

You can, accordingly, bail out to the end of chapter at any point if you think you’ve learned all you need to. But try to persevere, because you may find that the descriptions of the less common commands give you some new ideas about how to track and organize your project files.

Working with Groups and Subtrees of Files

Usually, the projects you want to put under version control have more than one file; it’s normal for them to contain all the files under a specific directory and subdirectory. Therefore, seeing a list of all version-controlled files beneath the current working directory is often useful. Being able to perform an operation on all of them en masse is even more useful.

VC mode supports this directly. The command C-x v d (for vc-directory) puts you in a buffer running a customized Dired (directory editing) mode, which lists all registered files under the current directory, indicating which, if any, are checked out and who has locked them. Starting with Emacs 19.30, the status field in this listing is automatically kept up to date by check-in and check-out operations.

If you mark several files in this Dired buffer (with the ordinary Dired mark command) and then perform either a vc-next-action ...