I ve been using git for some time now on Windows with msysGit and I like the idea of distributed source control Just recently I ve been looking at Mercurial hg and it looks interesting However I can t wrap my head around the differences between hg and git Has anyone made a side-by-side comparison between git and hg I m interested to know what differs hg and git without having to jump into a fanboy discussion

Nothing They both do the same both perform about equally The only reason you should choose one over the other is if you help out with a project that already uses one The other possible reason for choosing one is an application or service which only supports one of the system For example I pretty much chose to learn git because of github

Some people think that VCS systems have to be complicated They encourage inventing terms and concepts on the field They would probably think that numerous PhDs on the subject would be interesting Among those are probably the ones that designed Git Mercurial is designed with a different mentality Developers should not care much about VCS and they should instead spend their time on their main function software engineering Mercurial allows users to use and happily abuse the system without letting them make any non-recoverable mistakes Any professional tool must come with a clearly designed and intuitive CLI Mercurial users can do most of the work by issuing simple commands without any strange options In Git double dash crazy options are the norm Mercurial has a substantial advantage if you are a CLI person and to be honest any self-respecting Software Engineer should be To give an example suppose you do a commit by mistake You forgot to edit some files To undo you action in Mercurial you simply type hg rollback You then get a message that the system undos your last transaction In Git you have to type git reset --soft HEAD So ok suppose you have an idea what reset is about But in addition you have to know what --soft and --hard resets are any intuitive guesses Oh and of course don t forget the character in the end now what in Ritchie s name is that Mercurial s integration with 3rd party tools like kdiff3 and meld is much better as well Generate your patches merge your branches without much fuss Mercurial also includes a simple http server that you activate by typing hg serve And let others browse your repository The bottom line is Git does what Mercurial does in a much more complicated way and with a far inferior CLI Use Git if you want to turn the VCS of your project into a scientific-research field Use Mercurial if you want to get the VCS job done without caring much about it and focus on your real tasks

Yet another interesting comparison of mercurial and git Mercurial vs Git Main focus is on internals and their influence on branching process

These articles may help Git vs Mercurial Please Relax Git is MacGyver and Mercurial is James Bond The Differences Between Mercurial and Git Edit Comparing Git and Mercurial to celebrities seems to be a trend Here s one more Git is Wesley Snipes Mercurial is Denzel Washington

One thing to notice between mercurial of bitbucket org and git of github is mercurial can have as many private repositories as you want but github you have to upgrade to a paid account So that s why I go for bitbucket which uses mercurial

The big difference is on Windows Mercurial is supported natively Git isn t You can get very similar hosting to github com with bitbucket org actually even better as you get a free private repository I was using msysGit for a while but moved to Mercurial and been very happy with it

Are there any Windows-based collaborators on your project Because if there are the Git-for-Windows GUI seems awkward difficult unfriendly Mercurial-on-Windows by contrast is a no-brainer

Git is a platform Mercurial is just an application Git is a versioned filesystem platform that happens to ship with a DVCS app in the box but as normal for platform apps it is more complex and has rougher edges than focused apps do But this also means git s VCS is immensely flexible and there is a huge depth of non-source-control things you can do with git That is the essence of the difference Git is best understood from the ground up from the repository format up Scott Chacon s Git Talk is an excellent primer for this If you try to use git without knowing what s happening under the hood you ll end up confused at some point unless you stick to only very basic functionality This may sound stupid when all you want is a DVCS for your daily programming routine but the genius of git is that the repository format is actually very simple and you can understand git s entire operation quite easily For some more technicality-oriented comparisons the best articles I have personally seen are Dustin Sallings The Differences Between Mercurial and Git Reddit thread where git-experienced Dustin answers his own git neophyte questions He has actually used both DVCSs extensively and understands them both well and ended up preferring git

There are quite significant differences when it comes to working with branches especially short-term ones It is explained in this article BranchingExplained which compares Mercurial with Git

[git] What is the Difference Between Mercurial and Git?

I'm currently in the process of migrating from SVN to a DVCS (while blogging about my findings, my first real blogging effort...), and I've done a bit of research (=googling). As far as I can see you can do most of the things with both packages. It seems like git has a few more or better implemented advanced features, I do feel that the integration with windows is a bit better for mercurial, with TortoiseHg. I know there's Git Cheetah as well (I tried both), but the mercurial solution just feels more robust.

Seeing how they're both open-source (right?) I don't think either will be lacking important features. If something is important, people will ask for it, people will code it.

I think that for common practices, Git and Mercurial are more than sufficient. They both have big projects that use them (Git -> linux kernel, Mercurial -> Mozilla foundation projects, both among others of course), so I don't think either are really lacking something.

That being said, I am interested in what other people say about this, as it would make a great source for my blogging efforts ;-)

Examples related to git

• Does the target directory for a git clone have to match the repo name? • Git fatal: protocol 'https' is not supported • Git is not working after macOS Update (xcrun: error: invalid active developer path (/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools) • git clone: Authentication failed for <URL> • destination path already exists and is not an empty directory • SSL_connect: SSL_ERROR_SYSCALL in connection to github.com:443 • GitLab remote: HTTP Basic: Access denied and fatal Authentication • How can I switch to another branch in git? • VS 2017 Git Local Commit DB.lock error on every commit • How to remove an unpushed outgoing commit in Visual Studio?

Examples related to version-control

• How can I switch to another branch in git? • Do I commit the package-lock.json file created by npm 5? • Project vs Repository in GitHub • Remove a modified file from pull request • Git push: "fatal 'origin' does not appear to be a git repository - fatal Could not read from remote repository." • Git: How to squash all commits on branch • git: updates were rejected because the remote contains work that you do not have locally • Sourcetree - undo unpushed commits • Cannot checkout, file is unmerged • Git diff between current branch and master but not including unmerged master commits

Examples related to mercurial

• Convert Mercurial project to Git • Mercurial: how to amend the last commit? • Discard all and get clean copy of latest revision? • Mercurial undo last commit • How to save username and password with Mercurial? • Mercurial — revert back to old version and continue from there • Is there any way to delete local commits in Mercurial? • How to correctly close a feature branch in Mercurial? • How can I switch to a tag/branch in hg? • What is the difference between hg forget and hg remove?

Examples related to comparison

• Wildcard string comparison in Javascript • How to compare two JSON objects with the same elements in a different order equal? • Comparing strings, c++ • Char Comparison in C • bash string compare to multiple correct values • Comparing two hashmaps for equal values and same key sets? • Comparing boxed Long values 127 and 128 • Compare two files report difference in python • How do I fix this "TypeError: 'str' object is not callable" error? • Compare cell contents against string in Excel

Examples related to dvcs

• Pushing to Git returning Error Code 403 fatal: HTTP request failed • Git push won't do anything (everything up-to-date) • Mercurial — revert back to old version and continue from there • How do I show the changes which have been staged? • How can I stop .gitignore from appearing in the list of untracked files? • Undo working copy modifications of one file in Git? • What's the best three-way merge tool? • What is the Difference Between Mercurial and Git?