SQLlyEnvironment colors & cues
✓ functionalGive production the visual warning it deserves so your peripheral vision can save the day.
Give clients, projects, environments, and servers their own colors and icons. The point is simple: your peripheral vision should notice production before your hands get a chance to make it exciting.
Setting a cue
Open Manage Clients, Projects & Environments. Each entity carries a color (picked from a swatch or typed as a hex value) and an optional image you choose yourself - a customer logo, a project mark, a red circle for production. Both are part of the entity, not the connection, so one edit re-colors every connection filed under it.
Where the cue shows up
| Place | What you see |
|---|---|
| Explorer group headers | When connections are grouped by client, project, or environment, each header wears that entity's color and icon. |
| Server rows | A server node picks up the identity color of the environment it belongs to, so the color is present even in a flat, ungrouped list. |
| Status bar | The active connection's environment is badged - Dev, Test, Staging, Production - next to the connection trail. |
The status bar stays quiet for Local and for connections with no environment set. A badge on every local scratch database would train you to ignore badges, which is the opposite of the goal.
A cue is a reminder, not a guard
Color is the cheapest layer, so it is worth having - but it is the one that does nothing when you are not looking. Pair it with a real policy: an environment marked Production is read-only until you deliberately unlock writes, and Staging wraps non-reads in a transaction it rolls back. Those hold whether or not you noticed the red.