Modifying Subversion commit messages

Sometimes when I try to quickly repeat my last command in the terminal, I end up firing off a svn commit. Unlike with Git, you cannot modify commits in Subversion, but you can modify a revision’s properties — like the log message.

Here’s how:

svn propedit --revprop -r 1234 svn:log

This will open your $EDITOR and it lets you edit the log message for the specified commit (1234).

Note: in order to make this work, you repository needs to be configured correctly. This means you should rename /path/to/your/repo/hooks/pre-revprop-change.tmpl to /path/to/your/repo/hooks/pre-revprop-change and chmod +x it.