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Comment by EnderMB | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed this, oddly, while my workplace is transitioning to git from Mercurial.

A lot of developers using .NET tend to go for Mercurial because a while back it felt a lot nicer to use on Windows. It's why I always preferred using Mercurial. A few .NET shops that use TFP/VSO are moving towards Git for the Visual Studio support, but I've noticed a few Python and PHP developers making the switch to Mercurial.

To be honest, I rarely need to do anything more than the basics so neither has a huge benefit for me. Neither feels particularly faster than the other, and both have comparable GUI tools. Aside from when I am pushing stuff to GitHub I tend to use whichever one pops to my head first on a project. I reckon a lot of developers are probably the same.

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> A lot of developers using .NET tend to go for Mercurial because a while back it felt a lot nicer to use on Windows.

In my opinion it is more elegant. Git only works because it installs hacked up Linux utilities on Windows. In practice it might not matter but I feel dirty when I'm using "inelegant" solutions.

I guess it's a matter of taste or opinion but Mercurial is easier to use too. Though if you're just working on something solo the SCM doesn't really matter at all, you just commit and commit (and I mainly work solo).

Personally I also write mostly in Python so I'm naturally drawn to Mercurial.

Then again I've also been looking at and using Fossil for my projects because it's a single binary with no installer which makes it pretty cool in my opinion. It too works well and it's used as SQLite's SCM so I'm confident it won't screw up my projects. The other nice thing (although I haven't used them extensively) is that Fossil also includes an embedded web server that has a wiki and ticketing system so everything's integrated.

"Then again I've also been looking at and using Fossil for my projects because it's a single binary with no installer which makes it pretty cool in my opinion."

It actually relies on some configuration files in user's directory. I had troubles even launching it on a heavy-modified OS. I assumed it was a pretty simple and straightforward CLI tool that could work on bare-bone operating system. I was wrong!

It seems that most .NET devs prefer something baked straight into Visual Studio and my experience has been that this is part of the problem in getting those teams to migrate to Git, which is most powerful from the command line.

Personally, I greatly prefer my source control system to be separate from my development environment or IDE.

Microsoft released a git plugin for VS.

Git's pretty well baked straight into Visual Studio now that it's built into the latest version of Team Foundation Server.

Mercurial's the one where you really want to be using it from the command line. It's had VS plugins, but they're all kind of janky by comparison.

Or use TortoiseHg or SourceTree, if you're not comfortable with the CLI. They both work great. Also, if you need to host 'your own github', try RhodeCode.

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