Electric implements an interface to the Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) program, a popular version control system. This section assumes the user is familiar with how CVS works, and the various CVS commands. Such information is readily available on the web.

To enable Electric to use CVS, you must first configure the CVS Preferences (in File / Preferences..., "General" section, "CVS" tab). CVS must be enabled, and the repository location must be specified. Electric does not implement the CVS protocol, it merely provides an interface to interact with an external CVS program, so that program must be specified in the preferences. |

The Electric GUI allows the user to perform the common CVS commands via the menu File / CVS, or via the popup-context menu on the libraries and cells listed in the explorer tree. The menu commands apply to all libraries; the explorer-tree context menus apply only to the selected library.

With CVS enabled in Electric, the explorer tree uses colors to show the state of libraries or cells in CVS. When using a JELIB or ELIB library format, the library name and all cells are the same color, because the entire library is a single file. When using a DELIB format, the cells are different color, because each cell is its own file. The colors and their associated state are shown below. Colors at the top of the table will be displayed before colors at the bottom of the table, if two states are simultaneously valid.

State | Color
Conflicts with CVS version | Red
Locally Modified | Blue
Needs Update | Magenta
Added/Removed | Green
Unknown (not in CVS) | Light gray
Up-to-date | Black

These are the commands implemented by Electric:

- Commit Commit a locally modified version to CVS.
- Update Retrieves latest version from CVS repository.
- Get Status Check the status with respect to the CVS version.
- List Editors List other users who have a locally modified version of the file.
- Show Log Display a dialog of all versions of the file in CVS (allows checkout of specific version).
- Rollback Revert to latest CVS version.
- Add to CVS Add the file to CVS (requires a commit to actually add it).
- Remove from CVS Remove the file from CVS (requires a commit to actually remove it).
- Undo CVS Add or Remove Undo a previous CVS add or remove before a commit is done.
- Rollforward Move local modified file to a temporary location, get a fresh copy from CVS and put back the local copy. This is to prevent merge cases with conflicts and still preserve local modifications.