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

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 -

If I understand them correctly and I m far from an expert on each they fundamentally each have a different philosophy I first used mercurial for 9 months Now I ve used git for 6 hg is version control software It s main goal is to track versions of a piece of software git is a time based file system It s goal is to add another dimension to a file system Most have files and folders git adds time That it happens to work awesome as a VCS is a byproduct of its design In hg there s a history of the entire project it s always trying to maintain By default I believe hg wants all changes to all objects by all users when pushing and pulling In git there s just a pool of objects and these tracking files branches heads that determine which set of those objects represent the tree of files in a particular state When pushing or pulling git only sends the objects needed for the the particular branches you are pushing or pulling which is a small subset of all objects As far as git is concerned there is no 1 project You could have 50 projects all in the same repo and git wouldn t care Each one could be managed separately in the same repo and live fine Hg s concept of branches is branches off the main project or branches off branches etc Git has no such concept A branch in git is just a state of the tree everything is a branch in git Which branch is official current or newest has no meaning in git I don t know if that made any sense If I could draw pictures hg might look like this where each commit is a o o---o---o o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o o---o---o A tree with a single root and branches coming off of it While git can do that and often people use it that way that s not enforced A git picture if there is such a thing could easily look like this o---o---o---o---o o---o---o---o o---o o---o---o---o In fact in some ways it doesn t even make sense to show branches in git One thing that is very confusing for the discussion git and mercurial both have something called a branch but they are not remotely the same things A branch in mercurial comes about when there are conflicts between different repos A branch in git is apparently similar to a clone in hg But a clone while it might give similar behavior is most definitely not the same Consider me trying these in git vs hg using the chromium repo which is rather large time git checkout -b some-new-branch Switched to new branch some-new-branch real 0m1 759s user 0m1 596s sys 0m0 144s And now in hg using clone time hg clone project some-clone updating to branch default 29387 files updated 0 files merged 0 files removed 0 files unresolved real 0m58 196s user 0m19 901s sys 0m8 957 Both of those are hot runs Ie I ran them twice and this is the second run hg clone is the actually the same as git-new-workdir Both of those make an entirely new working dir almost as though you had typed cp -r project project-clone That s not the same as making a new branch in git It s far more heavy weight If there is true equivalent of git s branching in hg I don t know what it is I understand at some level hg and git might be able to do similar things If so then there is a still a huge difference in the workflow they lead you to In git the typical workflow is to create a branch for every feature git checkout master git checkout -b add-2nd-joypad-support git checkout master git checkout -b fix-game-save-bug git checkout master git checkout -b add-a-star-support That just created 3 branches each based off a branch called master I m sure there s some way in git to make those 1 line each instead of 2 Now to work on one I just do git checkout fix-game-save-bug and start working Commit things etc Switching between branches even in a project as big as chrome is nearly instantaneous I actually don t know how to do that in hg It s not part of any tutorials I ve read One other big difference Git s stage Git has this idea of a stage You can think of it as a hidden folder When you commit you only commit what s on the stage not the changes in your working tree That might sound strange If you want to commit all the changes in your working tree you d do git commit -a which adds all the modified files to the stage and then commits them What s the point of the stage then You can easily separate your commits Imagine you edited joypad cpp and gamesave cpp and you want to commit them separately git add joypad cpp copies to stage git commit -m added 2nd joypad support git add gamesave cpp copies to stage git commit -m fixed game save bug Git even has commands to decide which particular lines in the same file you want to copy to the stage so you can split up those commits separately as well Why would you want to do that Because as separate commits others can pull only the ones they want or if there was an issue they can revert just the commit that had the issue

I realize this isn t a part of the answer but on that note I also think the availability of stable plugins for platforms like NetBeans and Eclipse play a part in which tool is a better fit for the task or rather which tool is the best fit for you That is unless you really want to do it the CLI-way Both Eclipse and everything based on it and NetBeans sometimes have issues with remote file systems such as SSH and external updates of files which is yet another reason why you want whatever you choose to work seamlessly I m trying to answer this question for myself right now too and I ve boiled down the candidates to Git or Mercurial thank you all for providing useful inputs on this topic without going religious

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

This link may help you to understand the difference http www techtatva com 2010 09 git-mercurial-and-bazaar-a-comparison

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

If you are a Windows developer looking for basic disconnected revision control go with Hg I found Git to be incomprehensible while Hg was simple and well integrated with the Windows shell I downloaded Hg and followed this tutorial hginit com - ten minutes later I had a local repo and was back to work on my project

There is a dynamic comparison chart over at the versioncontrolblog where you can compare several different version control systems Here is a comparison table between git hg and bzr

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

If you are migrating from SVN, use Mercurial as its syntax is MUCH more understandable for SVN users. Other than that, you can't go wrong with either. But do check GIT tutorial and HGinit before selecting one of them.

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?