P4V, the Perforce Visual client, is Perforce's cross-platform graphical user interface. You can use P4V on Windows, Mac, UNIX and Linux computers and benefit from an identical interface regardless of platform. This introductory guide provides some Perforce basics and an orientation to P4V's layout and features. For more details about P4V, consult its online help. To learn more about Perforce, consult the user documentation on our Web site.
To use Perforce to manage files, you typically connect to the Perforce versioning service using an application like P4V. P4V enables you to check files in and out, and perform various other versioning tasks. The following sections tell you how to perform basic versioning with P4V and point out some of P4V's powerful features and shortcuts.
To gain access to your files, you must connect to Perforce. The first time you launch P4V, the Connection Setup Wizard (Mac: Connection Setup Assistant) guides you through the process of configuring a connection, during which you specify the server, user, and workspace. To launch the wizard/assistant in subsequent sessions, choose
The following figure points out the panes and important features of the main screen. To see what a button or screen element does, hold the mouse cursor over it. P4V displays a descriptive tooltip.
Your Perforce administrator can do this for you, but it's advisable to learn a few important aspects of configuring your workspace, specifically (1) configuring the workspace root directory and (2) configuring the workspace view.
To define a workspace, choose and, when prompted, enter a name for the workspace. To edit your current workspace specification, choose
Root: specifies the location on your workstation under which Perforce stores copies of depot files. Specify a meaningful name, and make sure it's
not set to your computer's root directory!
Workspace Mappings: enable you to restrict the depot files to which you have access. Set the view to ensure that you see only what you need to see.
To display and set the workspace view graphically, click the tab. Browse to desired files and folders and context-click to include them or exclude them from the workspace mappings, as shown in the following figure.
p4 sync //depot/Misc/manuals/...#head //depot/Misc/manuals/recommended_configuration.doc added c:\p4clients\bruno-1492\Misc\manuals\recommended_configuration.doc //depot/Misc/manuals/triggers.doc added c:\p4clients\bruno-1492\Misc\manuals\triggers.doc //depot/Misc/manuals/vendor_branches.doc added c:\p4clients\bruno-1492\Misc\manuals\vendor_branches.doc Sync copied 3 files to workspace (including 3 that were added) Sync removed no files from workspace Sync completed with no warnings or errors.
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Note that, when you check out a file, Perforce adds it to a changelist, which is a list of related files. You can use changelists to group related files, for example, all files that contain changes required to implement a new product feature. To view the changelist, choose or click
in the toolbar.
To edit a checked-out file, double-click it (or context-click it and choose , then select the desired application). P4V launches the corresponding editing application. Make changes and save the file.
To add a file to the depot, you must perform two actions. First, you mark the file for add, which places the file in a changelist, and then you submit the changelist, which copies the file to the depot.
To enable you to see what changes you've made, you can compare (diff) your edited file with the version you checked out. To diff, context-click the checked-out file in the left pane and choose
Diff . P4V launches the diff tool, displaying the differences between the two files. For example:
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Click . In the Log pane, P4V displays a message like the following:
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Display pending changelists: click  in the toolbar. P4V displays a list of pending changelists, as shown in the following figure. To display the files in a changelist, expand it 
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To view the changes made to a file or folder, context-click the file or folder and choose or . The history for the selected file or folder is displayed in the right pane. For example, the following figure shows the history of a folder, listing every submitted changelist that affected a file in the folder.
This diagram shows you when the file was created and how it was branched, and enables you to view details about each version submitted to the depot and navigate through the graph using the navigation map. For more details about the information displayed in the revision graph, consult P4V online help.
Using Time-lapse View, you can sweep through all revisions of the file using the slider, noting when changes were made and who made them. Again, for details, consult P4V online help.
P4V displays the changes as shown in the following figure. This example shows that, between the selected revisions, a file was edited and checked in. File highlights are color-coded to indicate additions, changes, and deletions. Expand folders and scroll to locate changes of interest. To skip to the next or previous change, click the right and left arrows
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Perforce streams are "branches with brains," a containerized approach to managing bodies of related files such as codelines. If your organization uses streams, you'll see streams depots in the Depot pane. Streams depots look like this:
. To display the streams in the depot:
For detailed information about streams in P4V, consult the online help. For general information, see
Introducing Perforce, the
P4 User's Guide and the
Perforce Command Reference.
P4V provides tooltips for many objects on the screen. For example, to display the status of a file, hold the mouse cursor over the file in the left pane. P4V displays a tooltip like the following one.
Another example: to display a changelist description, click 
in the toolbar and hold the mouse cursor over the changelist in the right pane. There are tooltips for all the P4V buttons, too.
P4V provides drag and drop shortcuts for common tasks. Drag and drop can simplify operations on large groups of files. For example, to check out all the files in a folder, drag the folder to a changelist. To diff two files, drag one to the other. For details about drag and drop shortcuts, refer to the P4V online help.
If you use Perforce to manage graphics files, P4V's thumbnail views enable you to preview the files. To display thumbnails, click the Files tab in the right pane, then select the desired thumbnail size from the title bar
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To keep a tab open, you can undock it. For example, context-click a file and choose File History, then choose . P4V opens it in a separate window, as shown in the following figure.
To configure P4V, edit its preferences (Mac: , Windows: ). The page enables you to associate applications with file types, overriding any operating system associations. The and
pages enable you to configure external applications, in case you prefer tools other than those that are bundled with P4V.
If you are a Perforce command line client user who occasionally uses P4V for certain functions, like viewing the Revision Graph or the Stream Graph, you can use P4VC, a command-line tool included with P4V that enables you to launch discrete P4V components from the command line without having to open a full P4V instance. For more information, type
p4vc help in the command line.
This guide helps you to start working with files using P4V and points out important basic features, but P4V enables you to do much more: create jobs, branch groups of files, and handle file conflicts that arise in team development settings.
Perforce administrators can perform administrative operations by choosing . Using the Administration tool, superusers can manage users and groups, along with their access to files and folders within the depot. Some administrative functions must still be performed using the Perforce command-line client (
p4). For details, see the
Perforce Command Reference and the
Perforce System Administrator's Guide.
To get the whole picture, read the P4V online help, Introducing Perforce and the
Perforce System Administrator's Guide. The guides, which are available from the Perforce web site, describe the full set of features that the Perforce Server provides. Perforce Technical Support is always ready to help you, and there's a thriving community of Perforce users active on the
perforce-user mailing list and the Perforce Forums. Consult our web site for details.
Copyright 2005-2014 Perforce Software.
Before you can edit the file, however, you must check it out.
indicating it is open for add.
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. The Streams tab is displayed.
