Three Dollar Quill

Today, I just focused on getting both old and shiny new Mercurial stuff configured in a way that makes sense to me. Basically, I'm trying out the Evolve extension, and moving any projects using Mercurial to requiring topic commits. (With an exemption for this blog, because the blog workflow is very boring, and I'm mainly using Mercurial so I don't have to learn something else.) We'll see how that treats me as I get back into things.

I also tweaked the color schemes a bunch, in response to an article or blog post that I read years ago and cannot figure out how to search for. The basic thesis of the article was that the tendency of most tools that deal with diffs to color code additions as green and deletions as red brings in associations that don't necessarily make sense for software development. In various domains, including status reporting, green is "good" and red is "bad", but that doesn't match up with the fact that the big problem with code is often too much of it. So, it recommends choosing more neutral colors for representing addition and deletion, to avoid biasing the judgement of whether given aspects of the change are "good" or "bad". We'll see how that works out for me.

All that, and I didn't touch the code. Tomorrow night. For now, I'm going to wrap up early, and try to tweak my color schemes a little bit more.

Good night.