Here are a couple of tools I plug-in into Surround SCM to make my life a little easier.

WinMerge & Surround SCM

Surround SCM ships with Guiffy, a really nice cross platform diff/merge tool.  Here is a good KB article about using Guiffy. While Guiffy is a great tool, I’ve always been a WinMerge guy, it’s what I’m comfortable with and we all know merging can be scary.

Surround lets you configure for whatever diff/merge tool you like. Here’s the how-to short version:

Tools->User Options->Diff/Merge.

At this point you can specify which diff/merge tool you want to use for certain file extensions. I let WinMerge handle all of the text files. Now when I diff/merge a file, even inside of Visual Studio or another IDE of my choice, WinMerge is used.

Notepad++ & Surround SCM

Since Surround integrates with almost every single IDE out there, most of the time I’m not interacting directly with Surround’s UI. But on the occasion I need to quickly view/edit a file from Surround, I prefer it to open with my text editor of choice. Surround comes with a built-in internal viewer, that, while sufficient probably isn’t as feature rich as your favorite text editor.  My preference for a text editor is notepad++. Here’s the short how-to version to configure Surround to open your application of choice (a much more in depth KB article can be found here):

Tools –> User Options –> View/Edit File

I set it up so notepad++ will handle all of my text files in view & edit mode, but you can limit this by file extension if you want. Now when I right click –> view/edit a file in Surround’s UI, the file is opened in notepad++.