You can use other CVS front ends, such as WinCVS, Eclipse, etc. in the same sandbox as TortoiseCVS. Bear in mind that different CVS front ends may have different limitations; refer to the documentation for the particular front end if in doubt.

You can of course also use the command line client directly. We recommend that you do not use the CVS client included with Cygwin (see the TortoiseCVS FAQ). The TortoiseCVS installation includes an appropriate version of the CVSNT command line client; you just need to add the TortoiseCVS installation folder to your PATH.

Using SSH from the command line needs slightly more: If you want the command line client to use the user-friendly TortoisePlink SSH client, you must set an additional environment variable, CVS_EXT. The variable should be set to tortoiseplink.exe -l "%u" "%h".