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Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

> GitHub won because Git won.

Sorry, but Git won because Github won. Lots of people loved (and still use) Mercurial. It lacked the network effect because Github didn't support it.

> GitHub bet on Git. Bitbucket bet on Mercurial.

Bitbucket didn't lose because of Mercurial. They lost because Github had a better product (in terms of sharing code, etc). It also was neglected by Atlassian in 2010.

> It seems strange now but there was a period of time during the late 00s and early 10s when developers were pretty passionate about their choice of DVCS.

Sorry buddy, but there are still plenty of us Mercurial users. Maybe, just maybe, even dozens!

(Seriously, I use Mercurial for all my projects).

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Me, I picked Python and Mercurial for primary language and DVCS, respectively: one of those worked out really well. I still miss hg and have never really gotten the hang of git.

Regarding Mercurial, would you happen to have recommendations for a GitHub/Bitbucket-like service that still works with hg?

> Regarding Mercurial, would you happen to have recommendations for a GitHub/Bitbucket-like service that still works with hg?

Use "jujutsu" (jj).

It's the goodness of Mercurial but works in the crappy world that Git has bestowed upon us.

I made the switch from Mercurial because it's just getting too hard to fight the git monoculture. :(

This looks cool; I might wait for 1.0, but the idea of git underneath and something better on top is appealing.

If you just want an online repository, go with Sourcehut (https://sourcehut.org/)

As someone who used both git and hg, I must say I'm sorry git won. Its chrome sucks (though less than it did) and the naming is confusing as hell. Still, if everyone uses git, and you have to use BitBucket for hosting instead of GitHub/Lab... Nah, not worth it. Kudos to you for sticking with it!

> Still, if everyone uses git, and you have to use BitBucket for hosting instead of GitHub/Lab

Isn't this supporting my point? That a barrier to use mercurial was that people preferred Github over Bitbucket?

> Kudos to you for sticking with it!

It's simple a lot easier to use it vs Git! Kudos to whoever suffers through the latter!

As someone who tried out both git and hg around 2012 with only svn experience, I found hg confusing and git easy to understand.

Unfortunately it's been so long since then I don't remember exactly what it was that confused me. Something around how they handle branches.

I've only recently started to use mercurial in earnest for one project (legacy reasons). It's branches for me too. At least considering my experience with it is limited.

I don't like how every time you pull someone else's changes you end by default in a state that is probably similar with git's detached head. With git, most of the time you are on a named branch, you know where you are and you pull/push stuff out of said named branch. With mercurial some of the branches are unnamed and it's still confusing why I'd want that. Perhaps the original designers didn't like having private local-only named branches, I don't know.

This may just be an artefact of my very limited experience with hg though.

When not sharing with others, bookmarks is the way to go - not branches. Mercurial bookmarks act more like git's branches. I think they've now made it so that you can share them too, but since no one else at work uses mercurial, I don't have experience with distributed bookmarks.

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