Schinckel.net

Before anyone gets excited, this isn’t about the long-awaited Finder plugin that will do for hg repositories what SCPlugin does for svn repositories: adding badges to the icons and allowing operations from within the Finder.

No, this is about using two great tools, SubEthaEdit and Changes with mercurial.

Firstly, let’s look at how we can use SubEthaEdit to be the editor for commit messages.

SubEthaEdit has a command line tool, which has some useful arguments. Use man see to see them.

The first of the ones I use is -w, which waits until the file has been closed before continuing the execution of the calling program. This is a required argument, as without it your message won’t be committed properly.

The next I use is -r, which causes the application that called see to be brought to the front after closing the file. This is not completely necessary, but saves a mouse-click.

-o new-window means open the file you are planning to edit in a new window. Again, not completely necessary, and irrelevant if you don’t use tabs at all, but I find it helps me to see which file I am editing if it appears ‘new’.

-m allows you to choose a particular mode to edit the file in. I have created a handy little hgCommit mode, so this can be used. I like this idea, as it means that lines that will not be committed are easily distinguished. And you can use a different background colour, so that it’s really clear what you are doing.

Finally, -j allows a custom title addition. Again, this is just a nicety, but I use it nonetheless.

The file ~/.hgrc allows you to have settings for an editor - I find that SubEthaEdit doesn’t quite work right with crontab, so I leave the EDITOR environment variable to nano. In the [ui] section of the .hgrc file, I have a line that looks like:

editor = see -w -r -o new-window -m hgCommit -j 'Mercurial Commit Message'

My hgCommit mode can also be downloaded, if you wish: hgCommit.mode.zip.

The next hint is using Changes. You’ll probably know this, if you have read the Changes WIki, but you can use the extdiff extension of Mercurial. The bit I missed is that you can also use Changes to merge by default. I wish you could do the same for diff.

To make Changes the default merge tool, create a script at /usr/local/bin/chmerge, or somewhere similar.

All that needs to go in this file is:

    #!/bin/sh
    chdiff ---wait $3 $1

And ensure it is executable. Mine is also owned by root, I think.

Then, in your .hgrc, add in the following line after your editor line:

merge = /usr/local/bin/chmerge

My final hint is how to get around errors when you have a remote filesystem mounted under sshfs, and you get an untrusted user or group error when trying to perform a mercurial operation. In my case, the files in question were owned by user 1001/group 1001. I added the following to my .hgrc:

    [trusted]
    users = 1001
    groups = 1001