Subversion

A long time ago I heard about version control tracking, or software that can keep track of changes to documents so that you don't have to, and thought it sounded pretty cool, but until about a year ago, I had never used it.  Well, I love it.  It makes it so much easier to code when you know that every time you commit a change it will be saved and so if you make any undesirable changes you can always roll back to a version that works.  It has also made my programming much more focused because I work on fixing one bug at a time and after I fix that bug, I commit that change and work on the next.  It's much easier to isolate problems with the code and have confidence that I am keeping track of my past work.  My preferred software is Subversion or SVN and comes standard with most Linux packages.  I just recently discovered a port to Windows that I really like called TortoiseSVN which is implemented as a Windows shell extension, for seamless integration into Windows Explorer.  I really like it so far and even provides for tracking of other non-text file formats such as '.doc' and '.xls'.  I searched to see if there's something similar for OSX and found this post which refers to a plugin called SCPlugin.  Although I haven't used it yet, it appears to be integrated with Finder.  Anyways, I'm excited to try it out.