Working on Wednesday #10 : Mercurial improved

Today I enjoyed the nice blue sky and moved to the park at the end of my street to finish reading the Mercurial guide.

I skipped the last chapters about patches and queues. I know this would be useful, but I'd rather get back to them when I'll need them instead of try them without any real world example.

Tweaking Mercurial

I updated my .hgrc to configure it as best as I could.

I set vimdiff to handle the conflicted merge. vim is quite hard to get (but it is coming easier the more you use it), but it seems so powerful that I'm willing to spend some time learning it.

I've also added a cm alias to commit -Am. This basically is the same as calling hg addremove; hg commit which I happen to do all the time before.

I've create two simple styles and matching templates for my new two aliases peek and hist that repectively display a peek at the last 4 commits, and display the latest 10 commits in history in a concise way. I still have to manage to find how I could add coloring to those.

I've also added a discardlocal alias to remove all local commit and get the repo back as it is on the remote repo. I never actually had to use it, but I found the code on Stack Overflow and thought I might need it later.

I finally wrote a custom resurect method. It will bring back a deleted file (obviously, the file needs to be tracked by hg). I simply find the changeset that deleted the file, and then revert the file to the parent changeset of that changeset. I might post the exact code later as I'm quite happy with the result.

A note on laptop screens

Also, I've spent the last few weeks working on my netbook when at home. This is very tiny thing, the screen is really small (compared to my two 21" at work for example). But (and I was the first surprised of it), you actually get accustomed to it after a while.

Now that I'm writing this post on my 13" other laptop, I feel like it's huge. The more I use the netbook, the more I like it. I didn't quite use it back when it was running Windows because it was way too slow. Now with Ubuntu on it, it's a whole new story !

Next week

I still have some zsh to learn. I still don't quite get the quote and double quote differences, and a few other quirks (arithmetic, arrays, etc).

I've kinda dropped the Rails tutorial. I liked it. Really, I liked it a lot. But I'm not sure I want to start again learning a framework for making websites. I've made a living doing websites for clients, I still do partly that today, and I'd like to change.

I have a lot of personnal project on my mind that I'd like to achieve. Almost all of them could be achieved using the traditional way of making websites that both cake and Rails would allow. But one of them might need another way to look at things. And for this one, I might better need node.

So.. maybe I'll start learning node next week. This is actually something I'd love to do, so this might happen. I'm currently refactoring the JS code of my work app in Backbone at the moment, so I guess there's no perfect time for some JS practice.

Tags : #rails, #resurect, #hg, #zsh, #wednesday, #backbone, #node-js

Want to add something ? Feel free to get in touch on Twitter : @pixelastic