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Comment by prima-facie | Hacker News Reader

Mercurial is a better tool than Git in almost every aspect. It's easy to learn and gets out of your way. I chose it over git a few years ago and sticked with it ever since and used Bitbucket to host most of my stuff. You don't get the community that Github has, but the hosting is great.

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I feel like I am taking crazy pills whenever somebody says that mercurial is simpler than git. Mercurial's per-file revlog and structured .hg/store/data is way weirder / more complex than git's SHA-addressed DAG with minimal/orthogonal object types. The only real blemish on git is that lightweight tags should not exist.

I'm pretty sure he's talking from the user's perspective, not design/implementation.

Eh, I am coming from the perspective of a user, not a VCS developer. I find git repositories way easier to navigate, let alone perform complex operations on, because how they work couldn't make more sense to me.

From a user's perspective, Hg is so limited I consider it basically unusable.

I seem to get my stuff done in either. What's missing for you in hg?

Being an active user of both git and hg, I also can't think of any features I make extensive use of in git (rebase, feature branches, etc) that I can't get with hg. My workflows in both are pretty much the same, just a saner interface on the hg side. If anything, git doesn't have revsets, a really powerful query language you can use to sift through your history - see http://www.selenic.com/hg/help/revsets

rebase -i and add --patch were the dealbreakers

Also I have yet to see a hg tutorial that didn't at some point recommend making a second clone of the repo in order to do something complicated.

As someone once commented, git is a great library for building a VCS system. Great design.

The tooling around it? Not so much. http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/

The default tooling is either your cup of tea, or it isn't. There is great 3rd party tooling available if your tastes are different though, such as where Github and I assume Bitbucket are moving. I think those are probably the future of git (and/or mercurial) use for non-technical users.

Probably mercury poisoning. It will make you as mad as a hatter. Symptoms include inability to rebase branches or rewrite history, choking on large repos, inability to do more than two-way merges, and clumsy handling of branches. Clean cup, move down, I guess.

> Mercurial is a better tool than Git in almost every aspect.

No need to proclaim personal tastes as absolute truths around here.

In any case, Bitbucket has complete git support.

> No need to proclaim personal tastes as absolute truths around here.

In all fairness, we all do that a lot.

Right, but github only allows, well, git repositories. If they added hg support I'd have a strong reason to think about putting repositories on my github account.

Adding hg support would be kinda awkward given their name.

I use and enjoy using Mercurial for most of my projects.

But it has nothing, NOTHING as good as git rebase -i

"hg histedit" is almost exactly the same as "git rebase -i", right down to the UI.

You have just made a huge improvement on my work life! Thanks so much

I would love to see you and Linux Torvalds have a discussion :)

I totally agree. Its one of those tools that stays out of your way unless you `need` to do something weird (unfortunately when you need to do that some times it can get really wierd). I feel like with git the base line is fairly complicated.

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