Using Color to Prevent Accidents

We are all familiar with the use of color for keeping our attention: stop lights, construction signs, warning labels, etc. To try to minimize the number of mistakes I make, I color code my terminal sessions.

On Windows I use PuTTY for creating a secure shell session into the servers that I need to access. One of the options it to set a background color for the session.


For production I set the background color to red and for development I set the background to green. The red color is a warning to myself: "You are on the production server. Don't screw things up!" Then for each server I log into, I save a session, and create a shortcut to it. In PuTTY the syntax is putty.exe -load "session_name". For example:

c:\putty.exe -load "dev"
c:\putty.exe -load "prod"

Color can't fix my stupid mistakes, but it has helped me to stay focused.

On the topic of color, I just read this article on Wired.com about how red keeps you focused and blue makes you more creative. Next step is to use Firefox Personas to color code my Firefox windows: red for coding and blue for designing.