Like any VCS, CVS is able to show the status of the current directory when compared with the repository from which it is checked out.
However, unlike SVN, GIT, or bzr, which by default show only a rather compact set of information, CVS provides already verbose information, with only an option to add even more, and no terse mode.
Luckily, piping its output through a few commands allows one to obtain such a compact cvs status display. I tend to use this, aliased to cvsst.
alias cvsst="cvs st | grep -vE 'revision|Sticky|^$|==|Commit' | sed -r 's/^File: |Status: //g'"
I'm fairly confident one could achieve the same result with just one sed script instead of the grep|sed pipeline, but in the meantime, this is useful enough.
Caveat: as you can easily imagine, if your directory contains files with names matching theses regexps, you'll not see them.
Care to offer a shorter/better solution ? Comments are open !