emacs `cvs -nq up | grep -e '^[MA]' | awk '{ print $2 }'`

From bash (may or may not work in other shells), run emacs, opening all locally-modified or added-but-not-committed files (e.g. so that cvs diff can be run on them, or to allow last-minute changes before committing them directly from within emacs, rather than the shell.

You could also include new files that haven’t yet been added to CVS by changing [MA] to [MA\?] in the grep. Be sure to note that everything after “emacs” is enclosed in backticks (the key to the left of the “1” key on most keyboards), not apostrophes.

(I’m sure this could be converted to vi and/or Subversion pretty easily, as well.)