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Comment by vailripper | Hacker News Reader

Having used Mercurial and Git, I have to say I vastly prefer the interface of Mercurial. It still has its quirks, but overall I find it much easier to use, especially on Windows. Git was very clearly built as a Unix solution first, with Windows support hacked on later.

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The worst thing in Git (comparing to Mercurial/other DVCSes) is that it is "more mainstream", thanks to GitHub. Everyone is assumed to have an account on GitHub (and such an account is even requested in the YC application form!), even if one is a Python programmer fond of Mercurial, or a Haskellista using darcs for everything around.

i tried to learn git and hg and i found that hg was so much more friendly to work with. when things go wrong in git, cryptic error messages are spawned and i have no idea what to do. when i do things in hg, error messages are actually helpful. even when things don't go wrong, hg constantly gives me helpful advice at the command line. example: after you do hg pull, it tells me that i need to do hg update. why can't git stuff like that?

I used both, too.

From the mercurial docs: "If you felt uncomfortable dealing with Git's index, you are switching for the better."

To be honest, after a few years with git, I feel uncomfortable without the index.

Agreed - although I will say I've lost count how many times I've had to explain to a junior that "push would create remote heads" just means you need to fetch and then push...

Interesting - haven't ever used Mercurial but as far as Windows ports of Unix-based tools go I love the git interface. I always run it in standalone shell mode, and its shell has enough Unix commands built in that I haven't even had the need to install cygwin on my new PC yet. The "check out line endings as \r\n, check in as \n" feature is a neat touch as well (granted, any decent text editor handles both kinds of line endings, but still).

Maybe I'm just an idiot, but it took me much longer than it should have to get SSH support setup for Github on my Windows box. I had no such issues with Hg.

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