Using MercurialEclipse with Dropbox

Summary

The tl;dr version of this post is that when I work on Android projects in my meagre spare time, the combination of MercurialEclipse and Dropbox allows me to stay focused on programming by quickly letting me keep my projects synced and under version control. To explain why, it is probably best if I describe the problems that they solve.

Dropbox

We have two laptops in my house, shared between three people. This means that I don’t always get to use my main development machine usually because my daughter is using it for Club Penguin, or my wife is using it for her studies. As a result, I have had to maintain two development environments, one for each laptop. Initially I tried to keep them in sync by backing up to a USB memory stick regularly. Unfortunately, it was too easy to forget this, as it was one more thing to do when I was pressed for time, and I would often mislay the memory stick.

Dropbox solved this problem, as it was a lot easier for me to remember to back up my projects to Dropbox than it was to go looking for the memory stick. This made me immediately more productive because I knew that no matter which laptop I was using, I could rely on the latest version of the project being available on Dropbox.

MercurialEclipse

I have been a fan of Mercurial for quite some time, but I have never been particularly happy with its Eclipse integrations, so I didn’t use them. I’m happy enough with the Mercurial command line, and with TortoiseHg, but it was always one more thing to remember to do when programming late at night.

That’s where MercurialEclipse came in. This is an excellent and comprehensive integration of Mercurial into Eclipse. I particularly like its Synchronization View. The way that I use it is probably obvious: each development environment has its own repository for any given project. I synchronize these with another repository on Dropbox. Even if I forget to do this, which is rare, it’s easy enough to merge once in a while.

Conclusion

Thanks to these two great tools I have been able to keep my development environments in sync with minimal effort, allowing me to concentrate my time on programming rather than wasting it on admin.