The best way to put is that hg forget
is identical to hg remove
except that it leaves the files behind in your working copy. The files are left behind as untracked files and can now optionally be ignored with a pattern in .hgignore
.
In other words, I cannot tell if you used hg forget
or hg remove
when I pull from you. A file that you ran hg forget
on will be deleted when I update to that changeset — just as if you had used hg remove
instead.