Saving time with Color Schemes

IDE, text editor, and dashboard color schemes are often treated as a way to get our personalities into the tools we use every day, but with a little effort it can also go a long way into saving time and giving a little peace of mind!

Have you ever intended to make a change to a project and implemented it into the wrong project, or wrong environment? At the time of writing I have 155 different dealer website projects with identical folder structures and file names. One moment of auto pilot snoozing could (and has) easily allowed me to paste into a wrong project. I’ve never had any harm done in this way apart from the 30 seconds to 2 minutes of QA troubleshooting to try and figure out why my changes aren’t appearing in my local environment!

These kinds of user error are usually a bit funny, but so avoidable! I can almost guarantee the proper fix has a lot to do with interruptions, multi-tasking, and focus; but a nice stop gap to fix this symptom can be using multiple color schemes!

In this video I show the simple process of using Sublime Project settings to differentiate. The snippet I use is in my User folder and can be seen here as a gist.

I don’t keep 155 themes on my machine; but I do tend to use about 3. One for our main boilerplate, and then a couple given themes for “current projects” which come and go quite quickly.

In a similar vein, I do like to have disparate themes in place in WordPress to differentiate local / staging / production sites. It would be too easy to make a mistake of that nature. I’ve never made a mistake in this way, likely in part to the fact that even just having two environments open concurrently makes me feel like I’m performing heart surgery. You can change your WP admin theme natively in your profile.

Hopefully I’m not the only one who finds this useful. I learn primarily through making mistakes, and feel like I’ve done it all!

Categorized in: Work

This post was written by ArleyM