Mercurial Reviews & Product Details

Mercurial is an Open Source very powerful DVCS. It is at the level of Git but with a much simpler user interface and one which provides a smooth transition from a centralized system like Subversion to a DVCS. It is written in Python and is thus portable: Linux but also MacOS, Windows are fully supported.

What I most like in Mercurial is its very gradual learning curve: even if you are not a version control specialist you can easily set it up for personal or group usage.

However, you can also add powerful extensions: rebase, transplant, bisect, large files, etc. You can use the phase mechanism to decide whether it is safe or not to allow history rewriting, you can install and use TortoiseHg, a very intuitive portable GUI, etc.

Also, a service such as bitbucket provides a web service to collaborate with your friends or colleagues on code with pull requests, as they have been popularized by Github. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I dislike most in Mercurial is that.. it is not more widely use!

Git is becoming very popular, even in companies previously using Subversion, Perforce, or Teamwork. People know git commands and so have difficulties with mercurial differences in: branches philosophy (Mercurial branches are more long-lived, while lightweight branches like in Git are similar to bookmarks in Mercurial), fetch/pull commands which are opposed in Mercurial and Git, etc. If you are heavily using both, like I do, you need to think twice before pulling or fetching! And even more when undoing mistakes, or you run the risk of loosing data.

Besides this lack of popularity which sometimes makes it difficult to work with others, Mercurial does not really have shortcomings in my honest opinion.. It "just works"! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

the branching model is better than Git's, cross branch merges and cherrypicks/grafts seem to be handled better aswell Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

since Mercurial releases new versions so often (good), most of the plugins for older versions do not work (bad). This is really a non-issue, because most of the times the features I used from plugins show up in the new Mercurial core. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Unlike similar tools (Git), Mercurial is incredibly easy to use and polished. It gives you the benefit of running a _distributed_ version control system without the hassle of needing to be a command line expert. On Mac, both I and the team used the command line frequently, but we learned on Windows with an amazing GUI client (Tortoise). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The hosting options for community Mercurial projects aren't as polished as those for Git. Everyone knows (and likely uses) GitHub. Mercurial is limited to self-hosting or less-polished tools like BitBucket or (soon to be defunct) Google Code. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

* powerful branching model (named branches, bookmarks)

* straightforward conceptual model and philosophy, especially compared to Git

* simple and intuitive command-line interface – modular commands and easy-to-discover new features

* understandable and concise documentation (help command, man page)

* easy to learn and properly understand, for above reasons

* excellent hg-git bridge that allows pulling and pushing to Git repositories easily, as if they were Hg repositories (e.g. GitHub)

* helpful IRC channel and generally friendly user base Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

* extension framework requires knowledge of Python

* harder to find developers who are comfortable with it – despite it being the easiest and most comfortable-to-use VCS in my experience, people default to Git & GitHub, where all the hype has been in recent years Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Mercurial is a very simple but powerful distributed source control manager. The most powerful feature is extensibility. There are tons of extensions and it's easy to write a new one, as Mercurial is written in python, a simple script can go a very long way. MQ (Mercurial queues) are a great way to keep work in progress. The command line makes a lot of sense and commands are very intuitive. There are great UI tools and it integrates with lots of software including the most popular IDEs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Mercurial and git are really similar, but I think git got the branching process right from the beginning. Mercurial introduced bookmarks that work like git branches, but their use is not as polished as with git. In some sense MQ (Mercurial queues) solve many of the shortcomings of branches. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In Mercurial common use cases are easy, more esoteric ones are possible, and the interface is a delight. Error messages are typically lucid. Command line help is useful, as are man pages and online tutorials. Mercurial is well-designed tool with a coherent user experience. (For the record, I have also used git extensively. Mercurial is much like git, but with fewer surprises and inscrutable messages.) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The worst part of mercurial actually has nothing to do with mercurial per se: mercurial lacks an ecosystem of well-integrated services. The best option is bitbucket.org, but in many respects that pales in comparison to github. This leads to an unfortunate dilemma: The coder's experience is much better with mercurial than git, but the github community and ecosystem of tools are vastly superior to those of bitbucket.

It is possible use github with mercurial via the hg-git plugin. This works well, including with bookmarks/branches and merges, and I use this strategy for github-hosted repos. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Mercurial team has paid close attention to what has worked with competing packages in the past from a user interface perspective. Thus the learning curve is minimized so you can learn the tool separately from learning the internals of distributed version control management. In general, the user experience is very good, and if you know SVN you can get started right away, learning as you go. For this reason, even though I use git at some customer's locations, I use git or svn, Mercurial is my own tool of choice. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Compared to git there are two things that Mercurial doesn't do as well. The first is that it is far more conservative about letting you switch heads with uncommitted changes (git will only abort if there is a conflict, but mercurial will only let you if it is a new head). In my view this is probably he most serious wart with Merurial in the user experience. The work around is to create a new head, commit, and graft or similar.

Also Mercurial does not currently have a way to flag files like a changelog for union merge though this is forthcoming. This results in needless conflicts requiring one to specify a union merge manually. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Mercurial is a really nice alternative to git. It's simple, beautiful and does what you need. It works for large projects too and it's easy to learn. You can just set a meeting with your team, show them some commands and the rest of the learning will be almost automatic. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It lacks the global support git has. And not a lot of hosting providers will offer support. It won't be woth it if you are using git in a large number of apps, migration is not worth it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Mercurial HG is what is called a distributed version control system (DVCS) that let you develop a repository completely offline. Basically when you clone a repository the full revision history is copied locally and you're enabled to add your own commits, even if your collaborators are working on their own clones.

It has a syntax that is easier to remember compared to git and works flawlessly on all the major platforms. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We adopted mercurial in our organization when there was no git support for windows users.

There are two things that I miss as a mercurial user:

- cheap branching

- support for collaboration services like github (there is Bitbucket from atlassian but I really like the fork-pull request model)

If I should take a decision today I would totally go with git. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I liked it's ease of use best. If you often find yourself wondering about how to do things with git, mercurial is for you. It offers much less functionality - and that is a good thing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes you need the extra power of git, and you have to use some workarounds or hacks to get your stuff done with hg. This does not happen very often, but when it does, the documentation is not very good, so you have a better chance with Google and Stackoverflow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.