Modern Mercurial with evolution is extremely pleasant, and the more I use it the more I abhor git whenever I have to go back to it. That plus Heptapod (fork of GitLab with Mercurial support) — it’s very nice indeed. I count myself lucky to mainly contribute to a project where we use all of this.

It’s a shame there’s still nothing quite like GitHub for Mercurial (anymore), where anyone can just sign up and create repositories. Heptapod has a public instance for FOSS, but it requires approval to create projects. There’s also a separate hosted instance for basically anything, but it’s commercial and costs money. One can also self-host, but GitLab is not exactly lightweight, and other solutions aren’t as integrated with evolution features.

I haven't tried it in a while, but mercurial supports reading and writing to git repos: https://wiki.mercurial-scm.org/HgGit and its page says that https://wiki.mercurial-scm.org/GitExtension is bundled, but doesn't handle all of git's features

why? I had to stop using it because no one else would, and the various centralized services dropped support for it. but it handled branching and merging much better, was easier to pick up, and was less likely to trash your local checkout.

maybe if someone rewrote it in rust it would be sexy again? rurcurial?